Who ain't a Salve? or Obamba's Beaten Army of Lovers

[Michael Bailey]

alice wellintown wrote:

>
> Frederick Douglass by Robert Hayden
> When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
> and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
> usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
> when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
> reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
> than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
> this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
> beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
> where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
> this man, superb in love and logic, this man
> shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues' rhetoric,
> not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
> but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
> fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.
>

I attended one of Robert Hayden's poetry classes back in the 1970s.
He was very impressive!



-- 
- "Souvenirs out of a childhood Doc had never felt he wanted much to
escape from"- IV, p 125