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W.Whitman Books, 304 Main Street, Middleburgh, NY (2026)

06/23/2026

Today we note the birth date of Anna Andreyevna Gorenko (June 23,1889 – March 5, 1966), better known by the pen name Anna Akhmatova, one of the most significant Russian poets of the 20th century. She was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in 1965 and received three nominations for the award the following year.

Akhmatova's work ranges from short lyric poems to intricately structured cycles, such as Requiem (1935–40), her tragic masterpiece about the Stalinist terror. Her style, characterized by its economy and emotional restraint, was strikingly original and distinctive to her contemporaries. The strong and clear leading female voice struck a new chord in Russian poetry.

Her writing can be said to fall into two periods – the early work (1912–25) and her later work (from around 1936 until her death), divided by a decade of reduced literary output. Her work was condemned and censored by Stalinist authorities, and she is notable for choosing not to emigrate and remaining in the Soviet Union, acting as witness to the events around her. Her perennial themes include meditations on time and memory, and the difficulties of living and writing in the shadow of Stalinism.

Primary sources of information about Akhmatova's life are relatively scant, as war, revolution and the Soviet regime caused much of the written record to be destroyed. For long periods she was in official disfavor and many of those who were close to her died in the aftermath of the revolution. Akhmatova's first husband, Nikolay Gumilyov, was executed by the Soviet secret police, and her son Lev Gumilyov and her common-law husband Nikolay Punin spent many years in the Gulag, where Punin died.

In November 1965, Akhmatova suffered a heart attack and was hospitalized. She was moved to a sanatorium in Moscow in the spring of 1966 and died of heart failure on March 5, at the age of 76. Thousands attended the two memorial ceremonies, held in Moscow and in Leningrad.
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Here’s a selection of poems by Anna Akhmatova for your consideration:

I Taught Myself To Live Simply

I taught myself to live simply and wisely,
to look at the sky and pray to God,
and to wander long before evening
to tire my superfluous worries.
When the burdocks rustle in the ravine
and the yellow-red rowanberry cluster droops
I compose happy verses
about life's decay, decay and beauty.
I come back. The fluffy cat
licks my palm, purrs so sweetly
and the fire flares bright
on the saw-mill turret by the lake.
Only the cry of a stork landing on the roof
occasionally breaks the silence.
If you knock on my door
I may not even hear.

--Anna Akhmatova
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It’s Not Your Love I Seek Tonight...

It’s not your love I seek tonight.
It’s in a safe place now, it’s hidden…
Believe me that I haven’t written
Resentful letters to your bride.
But take this sensible suggestion:
Give her my poetry to read,
Give her my portraits for protection —
The groom must always be this sweet!
And yet, these fools, they need and chase
The sense of utter victory,
Much more than friendly company
And memories of first sweet days…
And once the last of bliss is spent
With your beloved in this heaven
And for the sated soul again
All suddenly becomes repellent —
In my triumphant night, don’t stray
Back to me. I won’t let you enter.
How could I help you anyway?
I have no cure for your contentment.

--Anna Akhmatova
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In The Evening

The garden rang with music
Of inexpressible despair.
A dish of oysters spread on ice
Smelled like the ocean, fresh and sharp.
He told me: “I’m a faithful friend!”-
And lightly touched my dress.
How different from embraces
The touch of those two hands.
That’s how one strokes a cat or bird
Or looks at slender lady riders…
Just laughter in his quiet eyes,
Beneath his light gold lashes.
And the despondent voices of the violins
Sing out beyond the hanging smoke:
“Give blessings to heaven above
At last you’re alone with your beloved.”

--Anna Akhmatova
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We Don’t Know How To Say Goodbye

We don't know how to say good-bye
We wander on, shoulder by shoulder.
Already the sun is going down.
You're moody, I am your shadow.

Let's step inside a church and watch
baptisms, marriages, masses for the dead.
Why are we different from the rest?
Outdoors again, each of us turns his head.

Or else, let's sit in the graveyard
On the trampled snow, sighing to each other.
That stick in your hand is tracing mansions
In which we shall always be together.

--Anna Akhmatova
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The Return

The souls of all my dears have flown to the stars.
Thank God there’s no one left for me to lose–
so I am free to cry. This air is made
for the echoing of songs.
A silver willow by the shore
trails to the bright September waters.
My shadow, risen from the past,
glides silently towards me.
Though the branches here are hung with many lyres,
a place has been reserved for mine, it seems.
And now this shower, struck by sunlight,
brings me good news, my cup of consolation.

-- Anna Akhmatova [translated by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward]

[Reference for Anna Akhmatova’s poems: The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, Roberta Reeder (Editor), Judith Hemschemeyer (Translator), Zephyr Press (2000)]
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All content of this post is for educational purposes.
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06/22/2026

Today, we consider the poetic work of Kevin John Gilbert (July 10, 1933 – April 1, 1993), Aboriginal Australian author, activist, artist, poet, playwright and printmaker.

A Wiradjuri man, Gilbert was born on the banks of the Lachlan River in New South Wales. Gilbert was the first Aboriginal playwright and printmaker. He was an active human rights defender and was involved in the establishment of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in 1972 as well as various protests to advocate for Aboriginal Australian sovereignty.

He won the 1978 National Book Council prize for writers, for Living Black: Blacks Talk to Kevin Gilbert (1977).

Here are four poems by Kenneth Gilbert for your consideration:

New True Anthem

Despite what Dorothea has said
about the sun scorched land
you've never really loved her
nor sought to make her grand
you pollute all the rivers
and litter every road
your barbaric graffiti
cuts scars where tall trees grow
the beaches and the mountains
are covered with your shame
injustice rules supremely

despite your claims to fame
the mud polluted rivers
are fenced off from the gaze
of travelers and the thirsty
for foreign hooves to graze
a tyranny now rules your soul
to your own image blind
a callousness and uncouth ways
now hallmarks of your kind

--Kevin Gilbert
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Peer into the Campfire

Peer into the campfire
in the heart of the coals and see
I am and you – a stranger
is also here with me
existing in our space and time
and each unmeasured pace
with every spark and glowing beam
I scan the stranger’s face
to find their eyes, their ears, their soul
regardless of their race
I am and nothing cancels out
the fact and truth, my being
my very words in molecules
course signals in your brain
I am and you are with me
though finite it may seem
no longer strangers we have met
in this primordial dream
the ashes sifting slowly
reveal the orbs of heat
it’s me, we’re free
past barriers of the brain
and trampling feet.

--Kevin Gilbert
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Human Souvenirs

In your father’s house
there are many relics
graven images of war
Samri swords and family photos
two gold teeth ripped from a jaw
p***c hairs of native women
pleasured well before the sword
fell like God’s avenging angels
so their voice could not record
deeds and albums plastic heroes
trophies icons and The Word
bound in leather gold embossing
never read and never heard
native women dressed in saris
kimono grass skirts and n**e
he amidst their captured image
uniformed slouch hat and lewd
regiments he calls ‘My Divvy
jungle toughened trained to kill’
skulls of battle zoned children
bloom maiden hair on window sills
schrapnel from Korea and Vietnam
battle jackets crusted red
holes punched in to prove the whole point
“The only good ones are the dead”
20 million souls and bodies
killed in war since Hi**er died
Nagasaki Hiroshima Kampuchea Afghanistan
Phnom Phen Beirut Indonesia
Falklands Nicaragua El Salvador
war dogs never get their fill
at killing someone else in war
and the master politician CIA and KGB
millionaire munitions makers
Jews and Yanks and Aussies Poms
cut the surplus flesh and reap them
lemmings marching killing dying
rushing to the Man’s war drum.

--Kevin Gilbert
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Tree

I am the tree
the lean hard hungry land
the crow and eagle
sun and moon and sea
I am the sacred clay
which forms the base
the grasses vines and man
I am all things created
I am you and
you are nothing
but through me the tree
you are
and nothing comes to me
except through that one living gateway
to be free
and you are nothing yet
for all creation
earth and God and man
is nothing
until they fuse
and become a total sum of something
together fuse to consciousness of all
and every sacred part aware
alive
in true affinity.

--Kevin Gilbert
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[all poems from https://www.kevingilbert.com.au/poetry]
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All content of this post is for educational purposes.
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06/21/2026

Every Dad deserves a poem!

Happy Father’s Day to all those men who serve as parents and caregivers and to those who retain fond memories of a father’s love.

Here’s a selection of father-themed poems for your consideration:

Theodore Roethke (May 25, 1908 – August 1, 1963), American poet.

My Papa’s Waltz

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

--Theodore Roethke

[from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke, Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. (1961)]
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Naomi Ayala, Puerto Rican poet, translator, and educator (born 1964)]

My Dad Says

I can do anything, so I try yoga nidra
to see if I can find him.
He’s been dead four years now
though I tell people when they ask, two. Just two.
My mind refuses what it wants
even if I haven’t lost anything.
One day I caw like a seagull
swooping in for a long dive.
Another, I am hunger waking up the bear.
Today I go to the trees to listen
and he is an old cedar, but sweeter than that.
When I was a girl, I knew I’d never be a girl exactly.
He was the only one who knew it
and let me run wild, would never tell the others.

--Naomi Ayala

[from Poetry (December 2019)]
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Robert Hayden (August 4, 1913 – February 25, 1980), American poet, essayist, and educator.

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

--Robert Hayden

[from Collected Poems of Robert Hayden, edited by Frederick Glaysher, Liveright Publishing Corporation (1966)]
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Garrett Kaoru Hongo (born May 30, 1951), Yonsei, fourth-generation Japanese American academic and poet.

What For

At six I lived for spells:
how a few Hawaiian words could call
up the rain, could hymn like the sea
in the long swirl of chambers
curling in the nautilus of a shell,
how Amida’s ballads of the Buddhaland
in the drone of the priest’s liturgy
could conjure money from the poor
and give them nothing but mantras,
the strange syllables that healed desire.

I lived for stories about the war
my grandfather told over hana cards,
slapping them down on the mats
with a sharp Japanese kiai.

I lived for songs my grandmother sang
stirring curry into a thick stew,
weaving a calligraphy of Kannon’s love
into grass mats and straw sandals.

I lived for the red volcano dirt
staining my toes, the salt residue
of surf and sea wind in my hair,
the arc of a flat stone skipping
in the hollow trough of a wave.

I lived in a child’s world, waited
for my father to drag himself home,
dusted with blasts of sand, powdered rock,
and the strange ash of raw cement,
his deafness made worse by the clang
of pneumatic drills, sore in his bones
from the buckings of a jackhammer.

He’d hand me a scarred lunchpail,
let me unlace the hightop G.I. boots,
call him the new name I’d invented
that day in school, write it for him
on his newspaper. He’d rub my face
with hands that felt like gravel roads,
tell me to move, go play, and then he’d
walk to the laundry sink to scrub,
rinse the dirt of his long day
from a face brown and grained as koa wood.

I wanted to take away the pain
in his legs, the swelling in his joints,
give him back his hearing,
clear and rare as crystal chimes,
the fins of glass that wrinkled
and sparked the air with their sound.

I wanted to heal the sores that work
and war had sent to him,
let him play catch in the backyard
with me, tossing a tennis ball
past papaya trees without the shoulders
of pain shrugging back his arms.

I wanted to become a doctor of pure magic,
to string a necklace of sweet words
fragrant as pine needles and plumeria,
fragrant as the bread my mother baked,
place it like a lei of cowrie shells
and pikake flowers around my father’s neck,
and chant him a blessing, a sutra.

--Garrett Hongo

[from Yellow Light, Wesleyan University Press (1982)]
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All content of this post is for educational purposes.
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06/20/2026

Today we consider the poetic work of Irish [Belfast] poet Norman Derek Mahon (November 23, 1941 – October 1, 2020).

Mahon came out of the tumult of Northern Ireland with a formal, moderate, even restrained poetic voice. In an era of free verse, Mahon often wrote in received forms, using a broadly applied version of iambic pentameter that, metrically, resembles the "sprung foot" verse of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

In March 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, RTÉ News ended its evening broadcast with Mahon reading his poem Everything Is Going to Be All Right.

On October 1, 2020, Mahon died in Cork after a short illness, aged 78.
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Here’s a selection of poems by Derek Mahon for your consideration:

The Dream Play

What night-rule now about this haunted grove?
The spirits have dispersed, the woods
faded to grey from midnight blue
leaving a powdery residue,
night music fainter, frivolous gods
withdrawing, cries of yin and yang,
discords of the bionic young;
cobweb and insects, hares and deer,
wild strawberries and eglantine,
dawn silence of the biosphere,
amid the branches a torn wing
— what is this enchanted place?
Not the strict groves of academe
but an old thicket of lost time
too cool for school, recovered space
where the brain yields to nose and ear,
folk remedy and herbal cure,
old narratives of heart and hand,
and a dazed donkey, starry eyed,
with pearls and honeysuckle crowned,
beside her naked nibs is laid.
Wild viruses, Elysian fields —
our own planet lit by the fire
of molten substance, constant flux,
hot ice and acrobatic s*x,
the electric moth-touch of desire
and a new vision, a new regime
where the white blaze of physics yields
to yellow moonlight, dance and dream
induced by what mind-altering drug
or rough-cast magic realism;
till morning bright with ant and bug
shines in a mist of glistening gism,
shifting identities, mutant forms,
angels evolved from snails and worms.

--Derek Mahon

[from Collected Poems, The Gallery Press (2008)]
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Afterlives

(for James Simmons)

1

I wake in a dark flat
To the soft roar of the world.
Pigeons neck on the white
Roofs as I draw the curtains
And look out over London
Rain-fresh in the morning light.

This is our element, the bright
Reason on which we rely
For the long-term solutions.
The orators yap, and guns
Go off in a back street;
But the faith doesn’t die

That in our time these things
Will amaze the literate children
In their non-sectarian schools
And the dark places be
Ablaze with love and poetry
When the power of good prevails.

What middle-class sh*ts we are
To imagine for one second
That our privileged ideals
Are divine wisdom, and the dim
Forms that kneel at noon
In the city not ourselves.

2

I am going home by sea
For the first time in years.
Somebody thumbs a guitar
On the dark deck, while a gull
Dreams at the masthead,
The moon-splashed waves exult.

At dawn the ship trembles, turns
In a wide arc to back
Shuddering up the grey lough
Past lightship and buoy,
Slipway and dry dock
Where a naked bulb burns;

And I step ashore in a fine rain
To a city so changed
By five years of war
I scarcely recognize
The places I grew up in,
The faces that try to explain.

But the hills are still the same
Grey-blue above Belfast.
Perhaps if I’d stayed behind
And lived it bomb by bomb
I might have grown up at last
And learnt what is meant by home.

--Derek Mahon

[from Collected Poems (The Gallery Press, 2008)
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Lives

(for Seamus Heaney)

First time out
I was a torc of gold
And wept tears of the sun.

That was fun
But they buried me
In the earth two thousand years

Till a labourer
Turned me up with a pick
In eighteen fifty-four.

Once I was an oar
But stuck in the shore
To mark the place of a grave

When the lost ship
Sailed away. I thought
Of Ithaca, but soon decayed.

The time that I liked
Best was when
I was a bump of clay

In a Navaho rug,
Put there to mitigate
The too god-like

Perfection of that
Merely human artifact.
I served my maker well —

He lived long
To be struck down in
Denver by an electric shock

The night the lights
Went out in Europe
Never to shine again.

So many lives,
So many things to remember!
I was a stone in Tibet,

A tongue of bark
At the heart of Africa
Growing darker and darker . . .

It all seems
A little unreal now,
Now that I am

An anthropologist
With my own
Credit card, dictaphone,

Army-surplus boots
And a whole boatload
Of photographic equipment.

I know too much
To be anything any more;
And if in the distant

Future someone
Thinks he has once been me
As I am today,

Let him revise
His insolent ontology
Or teach himself to pray.

--Derek Mahon

[from New Collected Poems (The Gallery Press, 2011)
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Everything Is Going To Be All Right

How should I not be glad to contemplate
the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window
and a high tide reflected on the ceiling?
There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.
The poems flow from the hand unbidden
and the hidden source is the watchful heart.
The sun rises in spite of everything
and the far cities are beautiful and bright.
I lie here in a riot of sunlight
watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be all right.

--Derek Mahon

[click on the following ink to see and hear Derek Mahon read “Everything Is Going to Be Alright”.

https://youtu.be/ZNGU11lK_5E?si=DCNwp8Kj1QWbygY6

[from Collected Poems, Dufour Editions (2000)]
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All content of this post is for educational purposes.
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06/19/2026

Today we celebrate Juneteenth, officially Juneteenth National Independence Day, commemorating the end of slavery in the United States; the day when Major General Gordon Granger ordered the final enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas at the end of the American Civil War.

I’m including in today’s post an excerpt from the speech given yesterday by Michelle Obama at the opening of the Obama Center in Chicago, along with a poem by Mahogany L. Browne for your consideration.

[Excerpt of Speech by Michelle Obama Celebrating the Opening of the Obama Center, Chicago: June 18, 2016.

Click here to read the entire speech:
https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/hope-is-all-we-have-read-michelle-obamas-full-speech-at-obama-center-grand-opening/3950620/

“Because hope is the essential spark that lights the fire of change. But hope is a choice. Whether or not we use our voices to speak up is a choice. Voting is a choice. Being a decent human being is a choice. Believing that we still hold the power to build a country that reflects us all is a choice.

……So I hope that when you walk through this campus and bring your children here, you are reminded of the power of choice and the steady work of change. The arduous, unglamorous march march up that mountain one foot after another, day after day, generation after generation, but I also hope you fully absorb the elation of achieving something together.

You know that feeling when you clear the tree line and see a vista that takes your breath away? A feeling that can never be erased? And I know that can be hard to grasp right now when everything feels so upside down. When fact and fiction run together. When folks seek to stifle speech, limit access to education, devalue diversity, erase the inconvenient parts of our history. When our phones constantly buzz with the latest outrage.

….. Because that's the work of democracy. To being neighborly, taking care of public spaces, having some fun, enjoying each other, shaking out of the isolation and division that have crept too deeply into our lives.”

--Michelle Obama
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Here’s a poem by Mahogany L. Browne (born 1976), American poet, curator, writer, organizer and educator. Browne was the first-ever poet-in-residence at New York City's Lincoln Center.

When Fannie Lou Hamer Said

I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired

She meant

No more turned cheek

No more patience for the obstruction

of black woman’s right to vote

& plant & feed her family

She meant

Equality will cost you your luxurious life

If a Black woman can’t vote

If a brown baby can’t be fed

If we all don’t have the same opportunity America promised

She meant

Ain’t no mountain boulder enough

to wan off a determined woman

She meant

Here

Look at my hands

Each palm holds a history

of the 16 shots that chased me

harm free from a plantation shack

Look at my eyes

Both these are windows

these little lights of mine

She meant

Nothing but death can stop me

from marching out a jail cell still a free woman

She meant

Nothing but death can stop me from running for Congress

She meant

No black jack beating will stop my feet from working

& my heart from swelling

& my mouth from praying

She meant

America! you will learn freedom feels like

butter beans, potatoes & cotton seeds

picked by my sturdy hands

She meant

Look

Victoria Gray, Anna Divine & Me

In our rightful seats on the house floor

She meant

Until my children

& my children’s children

& they babies too

can March & vote

& get back in interest

what was planted

in this blessed land

She meant

I ain’t stopping America

I ain’t stopping America

Not even death can take away from my woman’s hands

what I’ve rightfully earned

--Mahogany l. Browne.
[from: Originally featured in Vibe]

Photo Credit: Jennie Bergqvist

06/18/2026

There are times when reading a translation or commentary on a known work fully illuminates its meaning.

Here’s a poem by John Keats (October 31, 1795 – February 23, 1821), English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" is a sonnet written by Keats when he was just 20 years old. Essentially, it is a poem about poetry itself, describing a reading experience so profound that an entire world seems to come to life.

The poem talks specifically about a translation of Homer, the Classical Greek poet, by George Chapman, an Elizabethan poet whose translations were more concerned with the reader's experience of the text than loyalty to the original form. The poem was published in the newspaper The Examiner soon after it was written in 1816.

Have you had a similar experience?

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

--John Keats

[from John Keats: The Complete Poems, Penguin Classics,
John Barnard (Editor) (1977)]
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All content of this post is for educational purposes.
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06/17/2026

Today we note the birth date of James Weldon Johnson, (June 17, 1871— June 26, 1938), poet, diplomat, and anthologist of black culture.

Johnson composed the lyrics of "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing," originally written for a celebration of Abraham Lincoln's birthday. A contest was held to determine what the United States anthem should be. "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" was entered and chosen as the winner; however when Johnson came forward to claim the prize the Judges rejected him and chose the second choice for the anthem "The Star Spangled Banner".

Lift Every Voice became widely popular and has become known as the "Negro National Anthem," a title that the NAACP adopted and promoted.

In 1917, Johnson published his first poetry collection, Fifty Years and Other Poems (1917). It showed his increasing politicization and adoption of the black vernacular influences that characterize his later work. He returned to New York, where he was involved in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.

Johnson had a broad appreciation for black artists, musicians and writers, and worked to heighten awareness in the wider society of their creativity. In 1922, he published a landmark anthology The Book of American Negro Poetry, with a "Preface" that celebrated the power of black expressive culture. He compiled and edited the anthology The Book of American Negro Spirituals, which was published in 1925.

Johnson published hundreds of stories and poems during his lifetime. He also produced works such as God's Trombones (1927), a collection that celebrates the African-American experience in the rural South and elsewhere, and the novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912)—making him the first black-American author to treat Harlem and Atlanta as subjects in fiction.

Based in part on Johnson's own life, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man was published anonymously in 1912, but did not attract attention until Johnson re-issued it under his own name in 1927.

Johnson died in a car accident in Wiscasset, Maine, on June 26, 1938, at the age of 67. More than 2,000 people attended his funeral in Harlem.
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Quotes and Poems by James Weldon Johnson

The colored people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people know and understand them.
--James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, ch. 2 (1912).
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Every race and every nation should be judged by the best it has been able to produce, not by the worst.
--James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.
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Beauty That is Never Old

When buffeted and beaten by life's storms,
When by the bitter cares of life oppressed,
I want no surer haven than your arms,
I want no sweeter heaven than your breast.

When over my life's way there falls the blight
Of sunless days, and nights of starless skies;
Enough for me, the calm and steadfast light
That softly shines within your loving eyes.
The world, for me, and all the world can hold
Is circled by your arms; for me there lies,
Within the lights and shadows of your eyes,
The only beauty that is never old.

--James Weldon Johnson
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The Awakening

I dreamed that I was a rose
That grew beside a lonely way,
Close by a path none ever chose,
And there I lingered day by day.
Beneath the sunshine and the show’r
I grew and waited there apart,
Gathering perfume hour by hour,
And storing it within my heart,
Yet, never knew,
Just why I waited there and grew.

I dreamed that you were a bee
That one day gaily flew along,
You came across the hedge to me,
And sang a soft, love-burdened song.
You brushed my petals with a kiss,
I woke to gladness with a start,
And yielded up to you in bliss
The treasured fragrance of my heart;
And then I knew
That I had waited there for you.

― James Weldon Johnson
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Prayer At Sunrise

O mighty, powerful, dark-dispelling sun,
Now thou art risen, and thy day begun.
How shrink the shrouding mists before thy face,
As up thou spring'st to thy diurnal race!
How darkness chases darkness to the west,
As shades of light on light rise radiant from thy crest!
For thee, great source of strength, emblem of might,
In hours of darkest gloom there is no night.
Thou shinest on though clouds hide thee from sight,
And through each break thou sendest down thy light.

O greater Maker of this Thy great sun,
Give me the strength this one day's race to run,
Fill me with light, fill me with sun-like strength,
Fill me with joy to rob the day its length.
Light from within, light that will outward shine,
Strength to make strong some weaker heart than mine,
Joy to make glad each soul that feels its touch;
Great Father of the sun, I ask this much.

--James Weldon Johnson
_________________

Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing

Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing,
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the list’ning skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chast’ning rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered.
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by Thy might,
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand,
True to our God,
True to our native land.

― James Weldon Johnson

Click on the following link to see and hear a rendition of "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" by Kirk Franklin and Chorus:

https://vimeo.com/566887430

[Poems from Complete Poems (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
by James Weldon Johnson, Sondra Kathryn Wilson (Editor, Introduction) (2000)]

See also, James Weldon Johnson: Writings, Library of America (2004)]
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All content of this post is for educational purposes.
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