Classic Poem

Lazy petals of magnolia-bloom float down the sluggish river,
Borne by the wind from deep bayous, where loose lithe boughs are trailing
Grey-green beards of Spanish moss; white flowers in the sluggish current;
But the black tide beneath them is rising.

Lofty and still, the trees
Stand like a columned ballroom for the dance
Of fireflies; green-white they spurt and flicker.
Down in the marsh the bullfrogs with bassoons
Hold a deep raucous bass above the chorus
Of katydid and cricket in the stillness: —
Remote and lone, the trees
Look down long clearings, grey-green in dense moonlight;
The hound-dogs bay, and glimmering lights peep out
From low dark cabin-doors.
But the white house keeps cold and high, aloof,
Its classic columns not yet given to decay:
It brings a day
To memory, when under its broad roof
Over unrotted and new-polished floors,
There flowed no grace
Like this, nor was there ever seen a face
So white, unearthly fair
As yours: —
But the moon in the woods knows better, for it has looked on despair.

Pale petals of magnolia-bloom thrust out white cups for coolness,
Magnolia-buds thrust up, hold themselves taut to the thunder
That beats across the ragged hills to southward
Its dull deep-muttering drum;
Between snake-fences staggering off over fields,
The strong green plumes of warrior-corn, the white dense clumps of cotton,
And miles away the strong and eddying current of the river
Fretting the green levees, night after night in the moonlight,
Where the strong black tide is rising, ever rising,
As it would rise forever.

Voices speak in the trees;
Voices shake in the leaves, as the leaves shake before thunder;
Ku-klux, the faint snick-snick of rifles,
Galloping horses, voices, crackle of twigs on the trail.
White figures flit past swiftly
Dissolving into moonbeams, that dapple the earth with shadows;
For tonight the eternal forest
Is filled with the hunt for blood.

(When a dry rain of mandolins, pulsing and fluttering, beats on the stiffened tuberoses
That hold up their chaste waxlike chalices, chill to the breeze of the night,
That runs out of red-gullied hills, and creaks through the pomegranate bushes
That flare out in startling scarlet all down the long avenue,
Under the sombre magnolias with the trail of the Milky Way going southwestward,
You whom I loved so of old — you whom I hold in my heart still —
I shall often think that I come back only to you).

Slowly, the moon, bronzed by the heat of the day,
Passes, a lithe brown fluteplayer; —
Slowly on streets where the dust hovers and settles,
From the mule-drays that rattled along
Bearing their bales in the morning;
Swinging the brown-bagged cotton,
Out of the fields to the town; —
Slowly the red earth cracks, and the white fronts of the houses
Stare into hopeless silence;
And slowly rises the river,
Seething, chocolate-brown;
Stealthily drifts on its current,
Sweeping, with many a shiver,
Over the cottonwoods, roosting on sandbanks, spectrally grey and surprising:
Writhing their branches to the sky; —
Slowly the black tide is rising.

Batter on your banjoes, roar you golden saxophones,
Beat your sullen bass-drums, jingle loud your tambourines,
Shout loud deep trombone voices, swell in amazing chorus;
White mobs of lynchers, vain is your work;
Vain is the web of your terror, you pass like mist in the morning:
Shifting and ebbing forever, leaving the land dark and naked;
Under the hail of your bullets, the river runs on still triumphant,
And the black tide in its banks is rising,
Rising, forever, rising!