Hegira
- Oh, black man, why do you northward roam, and leave
- all the farm lands bare?
- Is your house not warm, tightly thatched from storm,
- and a larder replete your share?
- And have you not schools, fit with books and tools the
- steps of your young to guide?
- Then what do you seek, in the north cold and bleak,
‘mid the whirl of its teeming tide?
- I have toiled in your cornfields, and parched in the sun,
- I have bowed ‘neath your load of care,
- I have patiently garnered your bright golden grain, in
- season of storm and fair.
- With a smile I have answered your glowering gloom,
- while my wounded heart quivering bled.
- Trailing mute in your wake, as your rosy dawn breaks,
while I curtain the mound of my dead.
- Though my children are taught in the schools you have
- wrought, they are blind to the sheen of the sky,
- For the brand of your hand, casts a pall o’er the land,
- that enshadows the gleam of the eye.
- My sons, deftly sapped of the brawn-hood of man, self-
rejected and impotent stand,
- My daughters, unhaloed, unhonored, undone, feed the
lust of a dominant land.
- I would not remember, yet could not forget, how the
- hearts beating true to your own.
- You’ve tortured, and wounded, and filtered their blood
‘till a budding Hegira has blown.
- Unstrange is the pathway to Calvary’s hill, which I
- wend in my dumb agony,
- Up its perilous height, in the pale morning light, to
dissever my own from the tree.
- And so I’m away, where the sky-line of day sets the
- arch of its rainbow afar,
- To the land of the north, where the symbol of worth
- sets the broad gates of combat ajar!