Helene Johnson:

Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem

A Missionary Brings a Young Native to America

A Southern Road

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Snally Gaster's African American Phat Library Experience

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Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem

You are disdainful and magnificant--
Your perfect body and your pompous gait,
Your dark eyes flashing solemnly with hate,
Small wonder that you are incompetent
To imitate those whom you so despise--
Your sholders towering high above the throng,
Your head thrown back in rich, barbaric song,
Palm trees and mangoes stretched before your eyes.
Let others toil and sweat for labor's sake
And wring from grasping hands their meed of gold.
Why urge ahead your supercilious feet?
Scorn will efface each footprint that you make.
I love your laughter arrogant and bold.
You are too splendid for this city street.



A Missionary Brings a Young Native to America

All day she heard the mad stampede of feet
Push by her in a thick unbroken haste.
A thousand unknown terrors of the street
Caught at her timid heart, and she could taste
The city of grit upon her tongue. She felt
A steel-spiked wave of brick and light submerge
Her mind in cold immensity. A belt
Of alien tenets choked the songs that surged
Within her when alone each night she knelt
At prayer. And as the moon grew large and white
Above the roof, afraid that she would scream
Aloud her young abandon to the night,
She mumbled Latin litanies and dream
Unholy dreams while waiting for the light.


A Southern Road

Yolk- colored tongue
Parched beneath a burning sky,
A lazy little tune
Hummed up the crest of some
Softs sloping hill.
One streaming line of beauty
Flowering by a forest
Pregnant with tears.
A hidden nest for beauty
Idly flung ny God
In one lonely lingering hour
Before the Sabbath.
A blue-fruited black gum,
Like a tall predella,
Bears a dangling figure,--
Sacrificial dower to the raff, Swinging alone,
A solemn, tortured shadow in the air.