Page:Negro poets and their poems (IA negropoetstheirp00kerl).pdf/212

190 For you, sweetheart, I’d have each dart Sorrow fashions for your tender heart, Thrust in my own thrice happy breast, That yours might have unbroken rest. If you should fall asleep and lie So very still and quiet that I Would know your soul had slipped away From your divinely molded clay, Then, looking in your fair, sweet face I’d pray to God: “In thy good grace, O, Father, let me sleep, nor wake Again on earth, for her dear sake.”

Born in Humbolt, Tennessee, in 1875, Fisher died of tuberculosis, ere yet thirty years of age, leaving behind an unpublished volume of poems.

In another chapter I have written of a poet whose birthplace was Bardstown, Kentucky. W. Clarence Jordan, a Negro schoolmaster of Bardstown, now dead, wrote the following lines in answer to the questions, so frequently asked in derision, which stands as its title:

As we pass along life’s highway, Day by day, Thousands daily ask the question, “What, I pray,