• The stars went out and so did the moon.
  The singer stopped playing and went to bed
  While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
  He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.
  • "The Weary Blues," from The Weary Blues (1926)

• Way Down South in Dixie
  (Break the heart of me)
  They hung my black young lover
  To a cross roads tree.
  • "Song for a Dark Girl" (l. 1-4), from Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927)

• Love is a naked shadow
  On a gnarled and naked tree.
  • Song for a Dark Girl (l. 11-12), from Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927)

• While over Alabama earth
  These words are gently spoken:
  Serve — and hate will die unborn.
  Love — and chains are broken.
  • "Alabama Earth (at Booker Washington's grave)," from the anthology Golden Slippers: An Anthology of Negro Poetry for Young Readers (1941), ed. Arna Bontemps

• Hold fast to dreams
  For if dreams die
  Life is a broken-winged bird
  That cannot fly.
  • "Dreams," from the anthology Golden Slippers: An Anthology of Negro Poetry for Young Readers, ed. Arna Bontemps (1941)

• I was so sick last night I
  Didn't hardly know my mind.
  So sick last night I
  Didn't know my mind.
  I drunk some bad licker that
  Almost made me blind.
  • "Morning After," (l. 1-6), from Shakespeare in Harlem (1942)

• I swear to the Lord
  I still can't see
  Why Democracy means
  Everybody but me.
  • "The Black Man Speaks," from Jim Crow's Last Stand (1943)

• I, too, sing America.
  I am the darker brother.
  They send me to eat in the kitchen
  When company comes,
  But I laugh,
  And eat well,
  And grow strong.
  • "I, Too, Sing America," in the magazine Survey Graphic (March 1925); reprinted in Selected Poems (1959)

• They'll see how beautiful I am
  And be ashamed —
  I, too, am America.
  • "I, Too, Sing America," in the magazine Survey Graphic (March 1925); reprinted in Selected Poems (1959)

• The night is beautiful,
  So are the faces of my people.
  • "My People," in the magazine Poems in Crisis (October 1923); reprinted in The Weary Blues (1926)

• I've known rivers:
  I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
  flow of human blood in human veins.
  My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
  • "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," from The Weary Blues (1926)

• Let America be America again.
  Let it be the dream it used to be.

• Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed —
  Let it be that great strong land of love
  Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
  That any man be crushed by one above.

• O, let my land be a land where Liberty
  Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
  But opportunity is real, and life is free,
  Equality is in the air we breathe.

• I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
  I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
  I am the red man driven from the land,
  I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek —
  And finding only the same old stupid plan
  Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

 

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