Page:Negro poets and their poems (IA negropoetstheirp00kerl).pdf/144

122 with the world’s master minds in books, Mr. Hawkins is by necessity—while his spirit soars—the slave of routine toil, being, until recently, a mail clerk in the post office of the City of Washington. “My only recreation,” he writes me, “is in stealing away to be with the masters, the intellectual dynamos, of the world, who converse with me without wincing and deliver me the key to life’s riddle.”

A true expression of himself I said Mr. Hawkins’s poems are. In no degree are they fictions. As a companion to Credo, quoted to introduce him, I will give the last poem in his book, which will again set him before us as he is:

Let me seek no statesman’s mantle, Let me seek no victor’s wreath, Let my sword unstained in battle Still lie rusting in its sheath; Let my garments be unsullied, Let no man’s blood to me cling; Life is love and earth is heaven, If I may but soar and sing. This then is my sternest struggle, Ease the load and sing my song, Lift the lame and cheer the cheerless As they plod the road along; And we see ourselves transfigured In a new and bigger plan; Man transformed, his own Messiah, God embodied into man.