Famous Long Africa Poems

Famous Long Africa Poems. Long Africa Poetry by Famous Poets. A collection of the all-time best Africa long poems

See also: Long Member Poems

I was a little boy, at home with strangers.   
I liked my playmates, and knew well,   
Whence all their parents came; 
From England, Scotland, royal France   
From Germany and oft by chance 
The humble Emerald Isle. 

But my brown skin and close-curled hair 
Was alien, and how it grew, none knew; 
Few tried to say, some dropped a wonderful word or stray; 
Some laughed and stared. 

And then it came: I dreamed.   
I placed together all I knew 
All hints and slurs together drew.   
I dreamed. 

I made one picture of what nothing seemed   
I shuddered in dumb terror 
In silence screamed, 
For now it seemed this I had dreamed; 

How up from Hell, a land had leaped 
A wretched land, all scorched and seamed   
Covered with ashes, chained with pain   
Streaming with blood, in horror lain   
Its very air a shriek of death 
And agony of hurt. 

Anon I woke, but in one corner of my soul   
I stayed asleep. 
Forget I could not, 
But never would I remember   
That hell-hoist ghost   
Of slavery and...
Read the rest of this poem...

 On March 1, 1958, four deserters from the French Army of North Africa, 
August Rein, Henri Bruette, Jack Dauville, & Thomas Delain, robbed a 
government pay station at Orleansville. Because of the subsequent 
confession of Dauville the other three were captured or shot. Dauville 
was given his freedom and returned to the land of his birth, the U.S.A.

AUGUST REIN: 
from a last camp near St. Remy

 I dig in the soft earth all 
 afternoon, spacing the holes 
 a foot or so from the wall. 
 Tonight we eat potatoes, 
 tomorrow rice and carrots. 
 The earth here is like the earth 
 nowhere, ancient with wood rot. 
 How can anything come forth, 

 I wonder; and the days are 
 all alike, if there is more 
 than one day. If there is more 
 of this I will not endure. 
 I have grown so used to being 
 watched I can no longer sleep 
 without my watcher. The thing 
 I fought against, the dark cape, 

 crimsoned with terror that 
 I so hated comforts me now. 
 Thomas is dead; insanity, 
 prison, cowardice, or slow 
 inner capitulation 
...
Read the rest of this poem...

 AFRICA 

I will sing you a song of Los. the Eternal Prophet: 
He sung it to four harps at the tables of Eternity. 
In heart-formed Africa. 
Urizen faded! Ariston shudderd! 
And thus the Song began 

Adam stood in the garden of Eden: 
And Noah on the mountains of Ararat; 
They saw Urizen give his Laws to the Nations 
By the hands of the children of Los. 

Adam shudderd! Noah faded! black grew the sunny African 
When Rintrah gave Abstract Philosophy to Brama in the East: 
(Night spoke to the Cloud! 
Lo these Human form'd spirits in smiling hipocrisy. War 
Against one another; so let them War on; slaves to the eternal Elements) 
Noah shrunk, beneath the waters; 
Abram fled in fires from Chaldea; 
Moses beheld upon Mount Sinai forms of dark delusion: 

To Trismegistus. Palamabron gave an abstract Law: 
To Pythagoras Socrates & Plato. 

Times rolled on o'er all the sons of Har, time after time 
Orc on Mount Atlas howld, chain'd down with the Chain of Jealousy 
Then Oothoon hoverd over Judah & Jerusalem 
And Jesus heard her voice (a man of sorrows) he recievd 
A Gospel from wretched Theotormon. 

The human race began to wither, for the...
Read the rest of this poem...

 I 

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. 

"10 April 1800-- 
Blacks rebellious. Crew uneasy. Our linguist says 
their moaning is a prayer for death, 
our and their own. Some try to starve themselves. 
Lost three this morning leaped with crazy laughter 
to the waiting sharks, sang as they went under." 

Desire, Adventure, Tartar, Ann: 

Standing to America, bringing home 
black gold, black ivory, black seed. 

Deep in the festering hold thy father lies, of his bones 
New England pews are made, those are altar lights that were his eyes. 

Jesus Saviour Pilot Me 
Over Life's Tempestuous Sea 


We pray that Thou wilt grant, O Lord, 
safe passage to our vessels bringing 
heathen souls unto Thy chastening. 

Jesus Saviour 

"8 bells. I cannot sleep, for I am sick 
with fear, but writing eases fear a little 
since still my eyes can see these words take shape 
upon the page & so I write, as one 
would turn to exorcism. 4 days scudding, 
but now the sea is calm again. Misfortune...
Read the rest of this poem...

 White founts falling in the Courts of the sun, 
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run; 
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared, 
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard; 
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips; 
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships. 
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy, 
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea, 
And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss, 
And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross. 
The cold queen of England is looking in the glass; 
The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass; 
From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun, 
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun. 

Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard, 
Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred, 
Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall, 
The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall, 
The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird...
Read the rest of this poem...

 1
PROUD music of the storm! 
Blast that careers so free, whistling across the prairies! 
Strong hum of forest tree-tops! Wind of the mountains! 
Personified dim shapes! you hidden orchestras! 
You serenades of phantoms, with instruments alert,
Blending, with Nature’s rhythmus, all the tongues of nations; 
You chords left us by vast composers! you choruses! 
You formless, free, religious dances! you from the Orient! 
You undertone of rivers, roar of pouring cataracts; 
You sounds from distant guns, with galloping cavalry!
Echoes of camps, with all the different bugle-calls! 
Trooping tumultuous, filling the midnight late, bending me powerless, 
Entering my lonesome slumber-chamber—Why have you seiz’d me? 

2
Come forward, O my Soul, and let the rest retire; 
Listen—lose not—it is toward thee they tend;
Parting the midnight, entering my slumber-chamber, 
For thee they sing and dance, O Soul. 

A festival song! 
The duet of the bridegroom and the bride—a marriage-march, 
With lips of love, and hearts of lovers, fill’d to the brim with love;
The red-flush’d cheeks, and perfumes—the cortege swarming, full of friendly
 faces,
 young and old, 
To flutes’ clear notes, and sounding harps’ cantabile. 

3
Now loud approaching drums! 
Victoria! see’st thou in powder-smoke the banners torn but flying? the rout of the
 baffled? 
Hearest...
Read the rest of this poem...

 1
TO think of time—of all that retrospection! 
To think of to-day, and the ages continued henceforward! 

Have you guess’d you yourself would not continue? 
Have you dreaded these earth-beetles? 
Have you fear’d the future would be nothing to you?

Is to-day nothing? Is the beginningless past nothing? 
If the future is nothing, they are just as surely nothing. 

To think that the sun rose in the east! that men and women were flexible, real, alive!
 that
 everything was alive! 
To think that you and I did not see, feel, think, nor bear our part! 
To think that we are now here, and bear our part!

2
Not a day passes—not a minute or second, without an accouchement! 
Not a day passes—not a minute or second, without a corpse! 

The dull nights go over, and the dull days also, 
The soreness of lying so much in bed goes over, 
The physician, after long putting off, gives the silent and terrible look for an answer,
The children come hurried and weeping, and the brothers and sisters are sent for, 
Medicines stand unused on the shelf—(the camphor-smell has long pervaded the rooms,) 
The faithful hand of the living does not desert the hand of the dying,...
Read the rest of this poem...

 1
SINGING my days, 
Singing the great achievements of the present, 
Singing the strong, light works of engineers, 
Our modern wonders, (the antique ponderous Seven outvied,) 
In the Old World, the east, the Suez canal,
The New by its mighty railroad spann’d, 
The seas inlaid with eloquent, gentle wires, 
I sound, to commence, the cry, with thee, O soul, 
The Past! the Past! the Past! 

The Past! the dark, unfathom’d retrospect!
The teeming gulf! the sleepers and the shadows! 
The past! the infinite greatness of the past! 
For what is the present, after all, but a growth out of the past? 
(As a projectile, form’d, impell’d, passing a certain line, still keeps on, 
So the present, utterly form’d, impell’d by the past.)

2
Passage, O soul, to India! 
Eclaircise the myths Asiatic—the primitive fables. 

Not you alone, proud truths of the world! 
Nor you alone, ye facts of modern science! 
But myths and fables of eld—Asia’s, Africa’s fables!
The far-darting beams of the spirit!—the unloos’d dreams! 
The deep diving bibles and legends; 
The daring plots of the poets—the elder religions; 
—O you temples fairer than lilies, pour’d over by the rising sun! 
O you fables, spurning the known, eluding the hold of the known, mounting...
Read the rest of this poem...

 For 
 Carl Solomon 


 I 

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by 
 madness, starving hysterical naked, 
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn 
 looking for an angry fix, 
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly 
 connection to the starry dynamo in the machin- 
 ery of night, 
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat 
 up smoking in the supernatural darkness of 
 cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities 
 contemplating jazz, 
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and 
 saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene- 
 ment roofs illuminated, 
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes 
 hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy 
 among the scholars of war, 
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & 
 publishing obscene odes on the windows of the 
 skull, 
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn- 
 ing their money in wastebaskets and listening 
 to the Terror through the wall, 
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through 
 Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, 
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in 
 Paradise...
Read the rest of this poem...

 1
O TAKE my hand, Walt Whitman! 
Such gliding wonders! such sights and sounds! 
Such join’d unended links, each hook’d to the next! 
Each answering all—each sharing the earth with all. 

What widens within you, Walt Whitman?
What waves and soils exuding? 
What climes? what persons and lands are here? 
Who are the infants? some playing, some slumbering? 
Who are the girls? who are the married women? 
Who are the groups of old men going slowly with their arms about each other’s necks?
What rivers are these? what forests and fruits are these? 
What are the mountains call’d that rise so high in the mists? 
What myriads of dwellings are they, fill’d with dwellers? 

2
Within me latitude widens, longitude lengthens; 
Asia, Africa, Europe, are to the east—America is provided for in the west;
Banding the bulge of the earth winds the hot equator, 
Curiously north and south turn the axis-ends; 
Within me is the longest day—the sun wheels in slanting rings—it does not set for months;

Stretch’d in due time within me the midnight sun just rises above the horizon, and sinks
 again;

Within me zones, seas, cataracts, plants, volcanoes, groups,
Malaysia, Polynesia, and the great West Indian islands. 

3
What do you hear, Walt Whitman? 

I...
Read the rest of this poem...

 A Poem for Three Voices

Setting: A Maternity Ward and round about

FIRST VOICE:
I am slow as the world. I am very patient,
Turning through my time, the suns and stars
Regarding me with attention.
The moon's concern is more personal:
She passes and repasses, luminous as a nurse.
Is she sorry for what will happen? I do not think so.
She is simply astonished at fertility.

When I walk out, I am a great event.
I do not have to think, or even rehearse.
What happens in me will happen without attention.
The pheasant stands on the hill;
He is arranging his brown feathers.
I cannot help smiling at what it is I know.
Leaves and petals attend me. I am ready.

SECOND VOICE:
When I first saw it, the small red seep, I did not believe it.
I watched the men walk about me in the office. They were so flat!
There was something about them like cardboard, and now I had caught it,
That flat, flat, flatness from which ideas, destructions,
Bulldozers, guillotines, white chambers of shrieks proceed,
Endlessly proceed--and the cold angels, the abstractions.
I sat at my desk in my stockings, my high heels,

And the man I work for laughed: 'Have you seen something awful?
You are so white, suddenly.' And I said nothing.
I saw death in the...
Read the rest of this poem...

 Meanwhile the new-baptized, who yet remained
At Jordan with the Baptist, and had seen
Him whom they heard so late expressly called
Jesus Messiah, Son of God, declared,
And on that high authority had believed,
And with him talked, and with him lodged—I mean
Andrew and Simon, famous after known,
With others, though in Holy Writ not named—
Now missing him, their joy so lately found,
So lately found and so abruptly gone, 
Began to doubt, and doubted many days,
And, as the days increased, increased their doubt.
Sometimes they thought he might be only shewn,
And for a time caught up to God, as once
Moses was in the Mount and missing long,
And the great Thisbite, who on fiery wheels
Rode up to Heaven, yet once again to come.
Therefore, as those young prophets then with care
Sought lost Eliah, so in each place these
Nigh to Bethabara—in Jericho 
The city of palms, AEnon, and Salem old,
Machaerus, and each town or city walled
On this side the broad lake Genezaret,
Or in Peraea—but returned in vain.
Then on the bank of Jordan, by a creek,
Where winds with reeds and osiers whispering play,
Plain fishermen (no greater men them call),
Close in a cottage low together got,
Their unexpected loss and plaints outbreathed:—
 "Alas, from what high hope to what relapse 
Unlooked...
Read the rest of this poem...

 1 

Ye heavenly spirits, whose ashy cinders lie 
Under deep ruins, with huge walls opprest, 
But not your praise, the which shall never die 
Through your fair verses, ne in ashes rest; 
If so be shrilling voice of wight alive 
May reach from hence to depth of darkest hell, 
Then let those deep Abysses open rive, 
That ye may understand my shreiking yell. 
Thrice having seen under the heavens' vail 
Your tomb's devoted compass over all, 
Thrice unto you with loud voice I appeal, 
And for your antique fury here do call, 
The whiles that I with sacred horror sing, 
Your glory, fairest of all earthly thing. 


2 

Great Babylon her haughty walls will praise, 
And sharpèd steeples high shot up in air; 
Greece will the old Ephesian buildings blaze; 
And Nylus' nurslings their Pyramids fair; 
The same yet vaunting Greece will tell the story 
Of Jove's great image in Olympus placed, 
Mausolus' work will be the Carian's glory, 
And Crete will boast the Labybrinth, now 'rased; 
The antique Rhodian will likewise set forth 
The great Colosse, erect to Memory; 
And what else in the world is of like worth, 
Some greater learnèd wit will magnify. 
But I will...
Read the rest of this poem...

 to the memory of my friend SI-YA-U,
 whose head was cut off in Shanghai

A CLAIM

Renowned Leonardo's
world-famous
"La Gioconda"
has disappeared.
And in the space
vacated by the fugitive
a copy has been placed.

The poet inscribing
the present treatise
knows more than a little
about the fate
of the real Gioconda.
She fell in love
with a seductive
graceful youth:
a honey-tongued
almond-eyed Chinese
named SI-YA-U.
Gioconda ran off
after her lover;
Gioconda was burned 
in a Chinese city.

I, Nazim Hikmet,
authority
on this matter,
thumbing my nose at friend and foe
five times a day,
undaunted,
claim
I can prove it;
if I can't, 
I'll be ruined and banished
forever from the realm of poesy.

 1928


Part One
Excerpts from Gioconda's Diary

15 March 1924: Paris, Louvre Museum

At last I am bored with the Louvre Museum.
You can get fed up with boredom very fast.
I am fed up with my boredom.
And from the devastation inside me
 I drew this lesson;
 to visit
 a museum is fine,
 to be a museum piece is terrible!
In this palace that imprisons the past
I am placed under such a heavy sentence
that as the paint on my face cracks out of boredom
I'm forced to keep grinning without letting up.
Because
 I am the Gioconda from Florence
whose smile is more famous than Florence.
I am bored with the Louvre Museum.
And since you get sick soon enough 
 of conversing...
Read the rest of this poem...

 ("Zim-Zizimi, Soudan d'Égypte.") 
 
 {Bk. XVI. i.} 


 Zim Zizimi—(of the Soudan of burnt Egypt, 
 The Commander of Believers, a Bashaw 
 Whose very robes were from Asia's greatest stript, 
 More powerful than any lion with resistless paw) 
 A master weighed on by his immense splendor— 
 Once had a dream when he was at his evening feast, 
 When the broad table smoked like a perfumed censer, 
 And its grateful odors the appetite increased. 
 The banquet was outspread in a hall, high as vast, 
 With pillars painted, and with ceiling bright with gold, 
 Upreared by Zim's ancestors in the days long past, 
 And added to till now worth a sum untold. 
 Howe'er rich no rarity was absent, it seemed, 
 Fruit blushed upon the side-boards, groaning 'neath rich meats, 
 With all the dainties palate ever dreamed 
 In lavishness to waste—for dwellers in the streets 
 Of cities, whether Troy, or Tyre, or Ispahan, 
 Consume, in point of cost, food at a single meal 
 Much less than what is spread before this crowned man—- 
 Who rules his couchant nation with a rod of steel,...
Read the rest of this poem...