Page:Negro poets and their poems (IA negropoetstheirp00kerl).pdf/221

Rh Give us manly, thinking preachers And not shouting money-makers, Men of intellect and vision, Who will really help our people: Men who make the church a guide-post To the road of racial progress, Who will strive to fit the Negro For this world as well as heaven.

In another chapter I give one of Mr. Razafkeriefo’s poems in regular stanzas of the traditional type. It is but just to state that his productions exhibit a great variety of forms. His moods and traits, too, are various. There is the evidence of ardent feeling and strong conviction in most he writes.

This poet gets his strange name (pronounced rä-zäf-kerrāf) from the island of Madagascar. His father, now dead, “falling in battle for Malagasy freedom,” before the poet’s birth, was a nephew of the late queen of Madagascar, Ranavalona III. His mother, a colored American, was a daughter of a United States