by
Robert Hayden
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
Runagate
Runagate
Many thousands rise and go
many thousands crossing over
0 mythic North
0 star-shaped yonder Bible city
Some go weeping and some rejoicing
some in coffins and some in carriages
some in silks and some in shackles
Rise and go or fare you well
No more auction block for me
no more driver's lash for me
If you see my Pompey, 30 yrs of age,
new breeches, plain stockings, ***** shoes;
if you see my Anna, likely young mulatto
branded E on the right cheek, R on the left,
catch them if you can and notify subscriber.
Catch them if you can, but it won't be easy.
They'll dart underground when you try to catch them,
plunge into quicksand, whirlpools, mazes,
torn into scorpions when you try to catch them.
And before I'll be a slave
I'll be buried in my grave
North star and bonanza gold
I'm bound for the freedom, freedom-bound
and oh Susyanna don't you cry for me
Runagate
Runagate
II.
Rises from their anguish and their power,
Harriet Tubman,
woman of earth, whipscarred,
a summoning, a shining
Mean to be free
And this was the way of it, brethren brethren,
way we journeyed from Can't to Can.
Moon so bright and no place to hide,
the cry up and the patterollers riding,
hound dogs belling in bladed air.
And fear starts a-murbling, Never make it,
we'll never make it. Hush that now,
and she's turned upon us, levelled pistol
glinting in the moonlight:
Dead folks can't jaybird-talk, she says;
you keep on going now or die, she says.
Wanted Harriet Tubman alias The General
alias Moses Stealer of Slaves
In league with Garrison Alcott Emerson
Garrett Douglass Thoreau John Brown
Armed and known to be Dangerous
Wanted Reward Dead or Alive
Tell me, Ezekiel, oh tell me do you see
mailed Jehovah coming to deliver me?
Hoot-owl calling in the ghosted air,
five times calling to the hants in the air.
Shadow of a face in the scary leaves,
shadow of a voice in the talking leaves:
Come ride-a my train
Oh that train, ghost-story train
through swamp and savanna movering movering,
over trestles of dew, through caves of the wish,
Midnight Special on a sabre track movering movering,
first stop Mercy and the last Hallelujah.
Come ride-a my train
Mean mean mean to be free.
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by
Mark Doty
Glassmakers,
at century's end,
compounded metallic lusters
in reference
to natural sheens (dragonfly
and beetle wings,
marbled light on kerosene)
and invented names
as coolly lustrous
as their products'
scarab-gleam: Quetzal,
Aurene, Favrile.
Suggesting,
respectively, the glaze
of feathers,
that sun-shot fog
of which halos
are composed,
and -- what?
What to make of Favrile,
Tiffany's term
for his coppery-rose
flushed with gold
like the alchemized
atmosphere of sunbeams
in a Flemish room?
Faux Moorish,
fake Japanese,
his lamps illumine
chiefly themselves,
copying waterlilies'
bronzy stems,
wisteria or trout scales;
surfaces burnished
like a tidal stream
on which an excitation
of minnows boils
and blooms, artifice
made to show us
the lavish wardrobe
of things, the world's
glaze of appearances
worked into the thin
and gleaming stuff
of craft. A story:
at the puppet opera
--where one man animated
the entire cast
while another ghosted
the voices, basso
to coloratura -- Jimmy wept
at the world of tiny gestures,
forgot, he said,
these were puppets,
forgot these wire
and plaster fabrications
were actors at all,
since their pretense
allowed the passions
released to be--
well, operatic.
It's too much,
to be expected to believe;
art's a mercuried sheen
in which we may discern,
because it is surface,
clear or vague
suggestions of our depths,
Don't we need a word
for the luster
of things which insist
on the fact they're made,
which announce
their maker's bravura?
Favrile, I'd propose,
for the perfect lamp,
too dim and strange
to help us read.
For the kimono woven,
dipped in dyes, unraveled
and loomed again
that the pattern might take on
a subtler shading
For the sonnet's
blown-glass sateen,
for bel canto,
for Faberge
For everything
which begins in limit
(where else might our work
begin?) and ends in grace,
or at least extravagance.
For the silk sleeves
of the puppet queen,
held at a ravishing angle
over her puppet lover slain,
for her lush vowels
mouthed by the plain man
hunched behind the stage.
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by
Chris Jones
His name has been ghosted over the fence,
leaving an alias, burn, prison clothes.
I'm half the man, he says, not my sentence,
waiting on time that other people chose.
From their windows men sing out numbers, names,
hands to the grille light for the come-back call,
but words get lost, change allegiance, and blame's
out of their mouths, love's over the wall.
Later when I phone home and catch your voice
I think of slipping out to wind and rain,
to burning winter lights, and city noise,
to waiting on the platform for the train,
the slow bus climbing toward our terrace house,
and in that space, to reach you, say your name.
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