Tuesday 19 December 2017

Tuesday Poem: "Frederick Douglass" by Robert Hayden



When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,  

usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,  

when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,  

reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more  

than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:  

this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro  

beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world  

where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,  

this man, superb in love and logic, this man  

shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,  

not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,

but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives  

fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.



by Robert Hayden




For more information about poet, Robert Hayden, see:


https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-hayden

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