Thoughtful Thursday: Haunting Poems

With Halloween upon us, today’s Thoughtful Thursday poems are appropriately unsettling and haunting.  They are written by well known African American poets,  Jean Toomer  (1894-1967) and Claude McKay (1889-1948).  Enjoy.

Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones

Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones

In their hip-pockets as a thing that’s done,

And start their silent swinging, one by one.

Black horses drive a mower through the weeds,

And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds.

His belly close to ground. I see the blade,

Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade.

For the dim regions whence my fathers came
My spirit, bondaged by the body, longs.
Words felt, but never heard, my lips would frame;
My soul would sing forgotten jungle songs.

I would go back to darkness and to peace,
But the great western world holds me in fee,
And I may never hope for full release
While to its alien gods I bend my knee.

Something in me is lost, forever lost,
Some vital thing has gone out of my heart,
And I must walk the way of life a ghost
Among the sons of earth, a thing apart;
For I was born, far from my native clime,
Under the white man’s menace, out of time.

Claude McKay