Langston Hughes (1902 – 1967)
American poet, novelist, playwright and newspaper columnist.
While over Alabama earth
These words are gently spoken:
Serve — and hate will die unborn.
Love — and chains are broken.
You talk like they
don’t kick dreams
around downtown.
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records — Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn’t make me not like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath —
America will be!
You are white —
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That’s American.
Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that’s true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me —
although you’re older — and white —
and somewhat more free.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.
I swear to the Lord
I still can't see
Why Democracy means
Everybody but me.
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed —
I, too, am America.
When you turn the corner
And you run into yourself
Then you know that you have turned
All the corners that are left.
What happens
to a dream deferred?
Daddy, ain’t you heard?
O, let America be America again —
The land that never has been yet —
And yet must be — the land where every man is free.
Way Down South in Dixie
(Break the heart of me)
They hung my black young lover
To a cross roads tree.
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain —
All, all the stretch of these great green states —
And make America again!
A certain amount
of nothing
in a dream deferred.