I, Too, Sing America by Langston Hughes

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--

I, too, am America.

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I think the above poem fits well for today.

Langston Hughes: To a Black Dancer in The Little Savoy

To a Black Dancer in "The Little Savoy"
by Langston Hughes

Wine-Maiden
Of the jazz-tuned night,
Lips
Sweet as purple dew,
Breasts
Like the pillows of all sweet dreams'
Who crushed
The grapes of joy
And dripped their juice
On you?

Site For Langston Hughes Poetry

Check out this site Langston Hughes - poetry. It has many cool poems by Langston Hughes, one of my favorites being;

Dead in There

Sometimes
A night funeral
Going by Carries home
A cool bop daddy.

Hearse and flowers
Guarantee
He’ll never hype
Another paddy.

It’s hard to believe,
But dead in there,
He’ll never lay a
Hype nowhere!

He’s my ace-boy,
Gone away.
Wake up and live!
He used to say.

Squares
Who couldn’t dig him,
Plant him now—
Out where it makes
No diff’ no how.

Poetry by Langston Hughes - The Weary Blues

Poetry by Langston Hughes - The Weary Blues


Notes from YouTube; One of 25 video poems in Four Seasons Productions upcoming Moving Poetry Series - Three innovative new films - RANT * RAVE * RIFF. The Weary Blues was written by Langston Hughes in 1923 and recited in our film by author and Harvard Professor Dr. Allen Dwight Callahan. Learn more about this provocative new series, featured poems, poets and readers at www.4SeasonsProductions.com.

The Birthday Of Langston Hughes

It's the birthday of poet and novelist Langston Hughes, born in Joplin, Missouri (1902). His father divorced his mother and moved to Mexico when Hughes was just a baby. He was raised by his mother and grandmother, but after high school he went to Mexico to get to know his father for the first time. He was disgusted when he found that his father was obsessed with money and more racist than most white men Hughes had ever known.

He went to Columbia University for a year, but then he decided that he wanted to learn from the world rather than books. He quit college, hopped a boat to Africa, and as soon as the boat left New York Harbor, he threw all his college books overboard. He took odd jobs on ships and made his way from Africa to France, Holland, Italy, and finally back to the United States.

He got a job working as a busboy in a Washington, D.C., hotel, and one day he left three poems he had written next to the plate of the poet Vachel Lindsey. Lindsey loved them and read them to an audience the very next day. Within a few years, Hughes had published his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues (1926).

He got involved in the Harlem Renaissance and started to write poetry influenced by the music he heard in jazz and blues clubs. He said, "I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on Seventh Street... [songs that] had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going."

Hughes was one of the first African-American poets to embrace the language of lower-class black Americans. In his essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926), he said, "[I want to write for] the people who have their nip of gin on Saturday nights and are not too important to themselves or the community, or too well fed, or too learned to watch the lazy world go round."

In his poem "Laughers," he made a list of what he called "my people": "Dish-washers, / Elevator boys, / Ladies' maids, / Crap-shooters, / Cooks, / Waiters, / Jazzers, / Nurses of Babies, / Loaders of Ships, /Rounders,/ Number writers, / Comedians in Vaudeville / And band-men in circuses - / Dream-singers all."