Classic and Contemporary Poetry
DEEP SOUTH, by THOMAS MCGRATH Poet's Biography First Line: These are savannas bluer than your dreams Last Line: Of bones in museums, where the black boys yawn Subject(s): Catullus, Gaius Valerius (84-54 B.c.); Louisiana; Racism; Racial Prejudice; Bigotry | ||||||||
These are savannas bluer than your dreams Where other loves are fashioned to older music, And the romantic in his light boat Puts out among flamingos and water moccasins Looking for the river that went by last year. Even the angels wear confederate uniforms; And when the magnolia blooms and the honeysuckle, Golden lovers, brighter than the moon, Read Catullus in the flaring light Of the burning Negro in the open eye of midnight. And the Traveller, moving in the hot swamps, Where every human sympathy sends up the temperature, Comes of a sudden on the hidden glacier, Whose motives are blonder than Hitler's choir boys. Here is the ambiguous tenderness of 'gators Trumpeting their loves along a hundred miles Of rivers writhing under trees like myths -- And human existence pursues the last, The simple and desperate life of the senses. Since love survives only as ironic legend -- Response to situations no longer present -- Men lacking dignity are seized by pride, Which is the easy upper-class infection. The masters are at home in this merciless climate But deep in the caves of their minds some animal memory Warns of the fate of the mammoth at the end of the ice-age; As sleeping children a toy, they hug the last, fatal error, But their eyes are awake and their dreams shake as with palsy. * * * Over Birmingham where the blast furnace flowers And beyond the piney woods in cotton country, Continually puzzling the pale aristocrats, The sun burns equally white man and black. The labor which they do makes more and more Their brotherhood condition for their whole existence; They mint their own light, and their fusing fires Will melt at last these centuries of ice. This is a nightmare nimble in the Big House, Where sleepers are wakeful, cuddling their terror, In the empty acres of their rich beds, dreaming Of bones in museums, where the black boys yawn. Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.cc.press.org | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...BLACK WOMAN by GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON FOREDOOM by GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON I MUST BECOME A MENACE TO MY ENEMIES by JUNE JORDAN A SONG FOR SOWETO by JUNE JORDAN ON THE LOSS OF ENERGY (AND OTHER THINGS) by JUNE JORDAN POEM ABOUT POLICE VIOLENCE by JUNE JORDAN DRAFT OF A RAP FOR WEN HO LEE by JUNE JORDAN THE NIGHT THAT LORCA COMES by BOB KAUFMAN THE MYSTIC RIVER by GALWAY KINNELL ODE FOR THE AMERICAN DEAD IN ASIA by THOMAS MCGRATH |
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