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#blacklivesmatter
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Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, I heard a Negro play. Down on Lenox Avenue the other night By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light He did a lazy sway. . . He did a lazy sway. . . To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.
—Langston Hughes,
The Weary Blues
The gold moth did not love him
So, gorgeous, she flew away.
But the gray moth circled the flame
Until the break of day.
And then, with wings like a dead desire,
She fell, fire-caught, into the flame.
—Langston Hughes,
Fire-caught
(February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967)
was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri.
He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry. Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. He famously wrote about the period that "the negro was in vogue", which was later
paraphrased as "when Harlem was in vogue.
wikipedia.org/...
Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance started in the decades immediately following World War I, when huge numbers of African Americans migrated to the industrial North from the economically depressed and agrarian South.
When considering essential movements in American poetry, no conversation would be complete without a discussion of the Harlem Renaissance. With a lyricism seated in the popular blues and jazz music of the time, an awareness of black life in America, its assertion of an independent African American identity, and its innovation in form and structure, the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance is unmistakable.
Read More: poets.org/…
Poetshouse.org/programs-and-events/readings-and-conversations/harlem-renaissance-revisited
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Langston Hughes More Poetry
MERRY-GO-ROUND
Where is the Jim Crow section
On this merry-go-round,
Mister, cause I want to ride?
Down South where I come from
White and colored
Can't sit side by side.
Down South on the train
There's a Jim Crow car.
On the bus we're put in the back—
But there ain't no back
To a merry-go-round!
Where's the horse
For a kid that's black?
[Shared by cfk]
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