Claude McKay (1889 – 1948)
Jamaican writer and communist and part of the Harlem Renaissance.
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Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!
Idealism is like a castle in the air if it is not based on a solid foundation of social and political realism.
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
Oh some I know! I have embalmed the days,
Even the sacred moments when we played,
All innocent of passion, uncorrupt,
At noon and evening in the flame-heart’s shade.
The pavement slabs burn loose beneath my feet,
A chafing savage, down the decent street;
And passion rends my vitals as I pass,
Where boldly shines your shuttered door of glass.
I know the dark delight of being strange,
The penalty of difference in the crowd,
The loneliness of wisdom among fools.
The shivering birds beneath the eaves
Have sheltered for the night.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
And, hungry for the old, familiar ways,
I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.
I have forgotten much, but still remember
The poinsiana's red, blood-red in warm December.
Upon the clothes behind the tenement, That hang like ghosts suspended from the lines, Linking each flat, but to each indifferent, Incongruous and strange the moonlight shines.
Oh, I must keep my heart inviolate
Against the potent poison of your hate.
Deep in the secret chambers of my heart
I muse my life-long hate, and without flinch
I bear it nobly as I live my part.
Nations, like plants and human beings, grow. And if the development is thwarted they are dwarfed and overshadowed.
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