Page:Negro poets and their poems (IA negropoetstheirp00kerl).pdf/171

Rh The songs of the singer Are tones that repeat The cry of the heart Till it ceases to beat.

Neither in memory nor in dreams is there a refuge for the life-wounded heart of this woman:

What need have I for memory, When not a single flower Has bloomed within life’s desert For me, one little hour? What need have I for memory, Whose burning eyes have met The corse of unborn happiness Winding the trail regret?

And thus of her dreams, on the last page of her book:

I am folding up my little dreams Within my heart to-night, And praying I may soon forget The torture of their sight.

What are the experiences and what the conditions of life—what must they have been—which have had the tragic power to make a soul “try to forget it has dreamed of stars?” The world little kens what hearts in it are breaking, and why. To the grave the secret goes with the many, one in a million betrays it in a cry. But not here is it betrayed: