Page:Negro poets and their poems (IA negropoetstheirp00kerl).pdf/172

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A woman with a burning flame Deep covered through the years With ashes—ah! she hid it deep, And smothered it with tears. Sometimes a baleful light would rise From out the dusky bed, And then the woman hushed it quick To slumber on, as dead. At last the weary war was done, The tapers were alight, And with a sigh of victory She breathed a soft—goodnight!

Not without hurt to itself may the oyster produce its pearl. These poems from the heart of a woman remind me of nothing so much as a string of pearls. Each one is witness to a bruise or gash to the spirit. The lyric cry has not been more piercing in anything written on American soil, piercing all the more for the perfect restraint, the sure artistry. It was a heart surcharged with sorrow in which these pearls of poesy took shape from secret wounds. The heart of one woman speaks in them for thousands in America, else inarticulate. “We weep,” says the African proverb, “we weep in our hearts like the tortoise.” Without one word or hint of race in all the book there is yet between its covers the unwritten,