tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9174733237199839093.post-78766890204748751792008-03-05T20:05:00.000-08:002008-03-05T20:07:00.347-08:00<span class="poem"><b>Frederick Douglass</b></span><span class="poem"><br />by Robert Hayden from <i>Collected Poems</i> (Liveright).</span> <p><span class="poem">When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful<br /> and terrible thing, needful to man as air,<br /> usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,<br /> when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,<br /> reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more<br /> than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:<br /> this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro<br /> beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world<br /> where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,<br /> this man, superb in love and logic, this man<br /> shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues' rhetoric,<br /> not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,<br /> but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives<br /> fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.</span><br /></p>The AstroDykehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10246964556529554839noreply@blogger.com