Page:Negro poets and their poems (IA negropoetstheirp00kerl).pdf/258

236 of Johnson’s point of view, the reader will appreciate the following poem, remarkable for that restraint which adds to the potency of art:

O whitened head entwined with turban gay, O kind black face, O crude, but tender hand, O foster-mother in whose arms there lay The race whose sons are masters of the land! It was thine arms that sheltered in their fold, It was thine eyes that followed through the length Of infant days these sons. In times of old It was thy breast that nourished them to strength. So often hast thou to thy bosom pressed The golden head, the face and brow of snow; So often has it ’gainst thy broad, dark breast Lain, set off like a quickened cameo. Thou simple soul, as cuddling down that babe With thy sweet croon, so plaintive and so wild, Came ne’er the thought to thee, swift like a stab, That it some day might crush thine own black child?

There died in Fort McHenry hospital, February, 2, 1921, a soldier-poet of the Negro race, who had been called “the poet laureate of the New Negro,” his name Lucian B. Watkins. He deserved the title, whatever may be the exact definition of “the New Negro.” For in his lyrics, of many forms, racial consciousness reached a degree of intensity to which only a disciplined