BookNotes marks Black History Month
The poet and speechwriter, Terry Edmonds, whose latest collection is Question Marks published by DARKLIGHT PUBLISHING, has had a life journey from the projects in Baltimore, to being chief speechwriter for President Bill Clinton, and beyond. I invited him to be my guest for this edition of BookNotes during Black History Month.
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.
Robert Hayden, “Frederick Douglass” from Collected Poems of Robert Hayden, edited by Frederick Glaysher. Copyright © 1966 by Robert Hayden. Reprinted with the permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Source:The Collected Poems of Robert Hayden (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1966)
