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Showing posts with label Langston Hughes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Langston Hughes. Show all posts

Monday, January 15, 2024

"Langston" by Christopher Fox Graham

"Langston"

by Christopher Fox Graham

for one little girl
growing up in the segregated South,
Langston was her favorite 

Poet Langston Hughes signs autographs for young fans.
Photograph by Griffith J. Davis/Griffith J. Davis Photographs and Archives

in the Heart of Harlem
top floor 20 East 127th
Hughes howled for dreams deferred
in eleven revolutions 
the stinking rotten meat of Jim Crow
festering like a sore
running north from Joplin to New York
like he did
redlining himself into the Renaissance 
and a coming revolution

The Langston Hughes House is a historic home located in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City. It is an Italianate style dwelling built in 1869. It is a three story with basement, rowhouse faced in brownstone and measuring 20 feet wide and 45 feet deep. Noted African American poet and author Langston Hughes (1902–1967) occupied the top floor as his workroom from 1947 to 1967


Hughes found his home in Harlem
and “Harlem” found its home
in the anthologies and college textbooks
where the dream could sag like a heavy load


and one little girl
growing up in the segregated South,
handwrote her favorite:

“A world I dream where
               black or white,
“Whatever race you be,
“Will share the bounties of 
              the earth
“And every man is free,”



Hughes and King
the New Yorker and Alabaman
the communist and the Christian
traded stanzas and sermons

Poet Langston Hughes [Feb. 1, 1901-May 22, 1967], left, was called the father of the Harlem Renaisssance literary and arts movement. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. [Jan. 15, 1929-April 4, 1968] led the Civil Rights Movement until his assassination. Photo of Langston Hughes courtesy of Carl Van Vechten/Carl Van Vechten Trust/Beinecke Library, Yale Photo of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. courtesy of Marion S. Trikosko

In Lorraine Hansberry’s hands,
Hughes’ “Harlem” dried up
and tasted like a "Raisin in the Sun"


from the pulpit at Dexter Avenue Baptist,
in the heart of Montgomery
became the revolution’s war cry


in the hands 
of an Alabama preacher
with an army of churches at his back 
a dream deferred 
called all kinds of names
riding in the back end of the bus for no reason
swimming with its head deep under water
given no release

must explode

Emmitt Till in a casket
George Wallace in a doorway
John Lewis across a bridge in Selma

racial slurs from schoolchildren
like 6-year-olds always are

an army unto herself

President Barack Obama, Ruby Bridges and representatives of the Norman Rockwell Museum view Rockwell’s "The Problem We All Live With,” hanging in a West Wing hallway near the Oval Office, July 15, 2011. Bridges is the girl portrayed the painting, then 6-years-old, on her way to William Frantz Elementary School, an all-white public school, on Nov. 14, 1960, during the New Orleans school desegregation crisis. She was escorted by four deputy U.S. marshals
Official White House Photo by Pete Souza


“Emancipator looking down on demonstrators." Participants in the March on Washington in front of the Lincoln Memorial and massed along both sides of the Reflecting Pool, viewed from behind Abraham Lincoln statue” on Aug. 28, 1963. 
Photo by James K. Atherton for United Press International/Shorpy

the preacher turned revolution back into poetry
made a dream deferred into dream to come
into freedom ringing



there was one little girl
growing up in the segregated South,
who said Langston was her favorite

she collected, annotated and footnoted his poems
worn the pages rough in her collection
left bookmarks with her favorites

“Sunday Morning Prophesy”

“I, Too”


added the poems the editors omitted,
for a grandson unborn
in case he became a poet
or led a revolution

she heard him read poems, once 
killed four little girls

she heard him read poems, once
on a tour in Atlanta

sharing dreams so syrupy sweet
they would crust and sugar over
into a revolution burning
from her Atlanta
in the segregated South 
to his Harlem

Born in Joplin, Mo., Langston Hughes moved to New York City in 1947, and lived of his time in the city in the top apartment at 20 E. 127th Street in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, N.Y., until his death in May 1967. Photo by Robert W. Kelley/The Life Picture Collection


Langston spoke to her,
the way no other poet did

Langston was her favorite 
"which no one could imagine"
she said, 
a little white girl
growing up in the segregated South


she never met my son
she died 8 months before he was born
to honor him
to remember her
not for the revolution
but for their dream

Sylvia Rebie Redfield (December 14, 1925 - July 28, 2021)

of all her great-grandchilren
Langston 
would be her favorite

Thursday, March 31, 2022

Langston Hughes recites "The Weary Blues"

Poet Langston Hughes recites his poem, "The Weary Blues" (1925) to jazz accompaniment with the Doug Parker Band on the CBUT (CBC Vancouver) program "The 7 O'Clock Show" in 1958. 
Host Bob Quintrell introduces the performance.

"The Weary Blues"


BY LANGSTON HUGHES

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.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
Sweet Blues!
Coming from a black man’s soul.
O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan—
“Ain’t got nobody in all this world,
Ain’t got nobody but ma self.
I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’
And put ma troubles on the shelf.”

Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more—
“I got the Weary Blues
And I can’t be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can’t be satisfied—
I ain’t happy no mo’
And I wish that I had died.”
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
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.

from The Collected Works of Langston Hughes.