395

395

A savage flower bloomed that summer in D.C. :

A Russian spirit had followed the negros back over the sea,

(Wilson remarked upon their surreptitious movements),

The leaves fell over the boulevards, yellowed, drawn somehow

Out of their own substance, become shallow ;

The stars hung delicately in their ever-shifting alignments ;

Bodies hung in the dusk from the municipal lighting.

In place of a prophet, a nagging voice. “By the God of Heaven,

We are cowards and jackasses.” They fell out of the cradle

Into a grave, light blown down the wind. Huddle

In their clothes, listening to the roar of the big guns. Fighting

For breath, watching the water stream over the plain,

Watching the clouds dwindle and the sky brighten,

And the birds wheel out ahead and turn and fall inward again.

That grief they carried back to the capital, and Wilson

Saw that they had also carried back sedition and meant to sow.

Others move in association and carry up bodies in chains

Of hemp, and garland them in their own entrails,

And pull the bones out of their habitual places, and throw

Down into the fire whatever else, and leave, calmly,

Knowing one made nothing. Of what else, nothing made one.

Through all this commotion, our bright-eyed boy hurried home

To his genteel mother, hoping only not to fall sudden prey.

He would up sticks in some months and move away,

Taking with him the best sidemen of his Washington days.

Unto the breach, dear friends, unto a place of glass and chrome,

Unto a word that he had heard intoned, and in that intonation

The voice rise, satisfied in its own chorale. A dutch word : Harlem.

The blood falling from the slashed stump of a dirty coon's member

On a corner near U-street was a simple horror,

From which he simply fled, dragging his brothers along beside him.