AND this will be all?
And the gates will never open again?
And the dust and the wind will play around the rusty door hinges and the songs of October moan, Why-oh, why-oh?
  
And you will look to the mountains
And the mountains will look to you
And... (Read full poem)

Loud he sang the psalm of David!
He, a Negro and enslaved,
Sang of Israel's victory,
Sang of Zion, bright and free.

In that hour, when night is calmest,
Sang he from the Hebrew Psalmist,
In a voice so sweet and clear
That I could not choose but... (Read full poem)

Foreguarded and unfevered and serene, 
Back to the perilous gates of Truth he went— 
Back to fierce wisdom and the Orient, 
To the Dawn that is, that shall be, and has been: 
Previsioned of the madness and the mean,
He stood where Asia, crowned... (Read full poem)

Labor with what zeal we will,
Something still remains undone,
Something uncompleted still
Waits the rising of the sun.

By the bedside, on the stair,
At the threshhold, near the gates,
With its menace or its prayer,
Like a medicant it... (Read full poem)

This youth too long has heard the break 
Of waters in a land of change. 
He goes to see what suns can make 
From soil more indurate and strange. 

He cuts what holds his days together 
And shuts him in, as lock on lock: 
The arrowed vane announcing... (Read full poem)

All night I wrestled with a memory
Which knocked insurgent at the gates of thought.
The crumbled wreck of years behind has wrought
Its disillusion; now I only cry
For peace, for power to forget the lie
Which hope too long has whispered.  So I... (Read full poem)

I

All you that are enamored of my name 
And least intent on what most I require, 
Beware; for my design and your desire, 
Deplorably, are not as yet the same. 

Beware, I say, the failure and the shame
Of losing that for which you now... (Read full poem)

Blind Bartimeus at the gates
Of Jericho in darkness waits;
He hears the crowd;--he hears a breath
Say, "It is Christ of Nazareth!"
And calls, in tones of agony,


The thronging multitudes increase;
Blind Bartimeus, hold thy peace!
But still, above... (Read full poem)

To say that she came into me,
from another world, is not true.
Nothing comes into the universe
and nothing leaves it.
My mother—I mean my daughter did not
enter me. She began to exist
inside me—she appeared within me.
And my mother did not... (Read full poem)

The gates are chained, the barbed-wire fencing stands, 
An iron authority against the snow, 
And this grey monument to common sense 
Resists the weather. Fears of idle hands, 
Of protest, men in league, and of the slow 
Corrosion of their minds,... (Read full poem)

Oh, I should like to ride the seas,
A roaring buccaneer;
A cutlass banging at my knees,
A dirk behind my ear.
And when my captives' chains would clank
I'd howl with glee and drink,
And then fling out the quivering plank
And watch the beggars... (Read full poem)

Flaked, drifting clouds hide not the full moon's rays 
More than her beautiful bright limbs were hid 
By the light veils they burned and blushed amid, 
Skilled to provoke in soft, lascivious ways, 
And there was invitation in her voice 
And... (Read full poem)

Too sweet and too subtle for pen or for tongue
In phrases unwritten and measures unsung, 
As deep and as strange as the sounds of the sea, 
Is the song that my spirit is singing to me.

In the midnight and tempest when forest trees shiver, 
In... (Read full poem)