Poems by Robert Hayden

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The Whipping

The old woman across the way

is whipping the boy again

and shouting to the neighborhood

her goodness and his wrongs.

Wildly he crashes through elephant ears,

pleads in dusty zinnias,

while she in spite of crippling fat

pursues and corners him.

116

Robert Hayden

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,

102

Robert Hayden

Middle Passage

Jesús, Estrella, Esperanza, Mercy:

Sails flashing to the wind like weapons,

sharks following the moans the fever and the dying;

horror the corposant and compass rose.

Middle Passage:

voyage through death

to life upon these shores.

137

by Robert Hayden

Rungate Rungate

Runs falls rises stumbles on from darkness into darkness

and the darkness thicketed with shapes of terror

and the hunters pursuing and the hounds pursuing

and the night cold and the night long and the river

to cross and the jack-muh-lanterns beckoning beckoning

and blackness ahead and when shall I reach that somewhere

morning and keep on going and never turn back and keep on going

Runagate

136

by Robert Hayden

Frederick Douglass

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful

and terrible thing, needful to man as air,

usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,

when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,

reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more

than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:

this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro

beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world

129

by Robert Hayden

Monet's Waterlilies

Today as the news from Selma and Saigon

poisons the air like fallout,

I come again to see

the serene, great picture that I love.

Here space and time exist in light

the eye like the eye of faith believes.

The seen, the known

dissolve in iridescence, become

133

by Robert Hayden

Full Moon

No longer throne of a goddess to whom we pray,

no longer the bubble house of childhood's

tumbling Mother Goose man,

The emphatic moon ascends—

the brilliant challenger of rocket experts,

the white hope of communications men.

Some I love who are dead

were watchers of the moon and knew its lore;

143

by Robert Hayden

O Daedalus, Fly Away Home

For Maia and Julie)

Drifting night in the Georgia pines,

coonskin drum and jubilee banjo.

Pretty Malinda, dance with me.

Night is juba, night is congo.

Pretty Malinda, dance with me.

Night is an African juju man

weaving a wish and a weariness together

228

by Robert Hayden

Soledad

(And I, I am no longer of that world)

Naked, he lies in the blinded room

chainsmoking, cradled by drugs, by jazz

as never by any lover's cradling flesh.

Miles Davis coolly blows for him:

O pena negra, sensual Flamenco blues;

the red clay foxfire voice of Lady Day

(lady of the pure black magnolias)

151

by Robert Hayden

The Prisoners

Steel doors – guillotine gates –

of the doorless house closed massively.

We were locked in with loss.

Guards frisked us, marked our wrists,

then let us into the drab Rec Hall –

splotched green walls, high windows barred –

where the dispossessed awaited us.

Hands intimate with knife and pistol,

149

by Robert Hayden

Runagate Runagate

Runs falls rises stumbles on from darkness into darkness

and the darkness thicketed with shapes of terror

and the hunters pursuing and the hounds pursuing

and the night cold and the night long and the river

to cross and the jack-muh-lanterns beckoning beckoning

and blackness ahead and when shall I reach that somewhere

morning and keep on going and never turn back and keep on going

Runagate

124

by Robert Hayden

Mourning Poem For The Queen Of Sunday

Lord’s lost Him His mockingbird,

His fancy warbler;

Satan sweet-talked her,

four bullets hushed her.

Who would have thought

she’d end that way?

Four bullets hushed her. And the world a-clang with evil.

Who’s going to make old hardened sinner men tremble now

160

by Robert Hayden