in your shuffling feet,
And spirituals for a lenient Lord,
Who lets you sing your promises away.
You hold your sunny corner of the street,
And pluck deep beauty from a banjo chord:
Philosopher whose future is today!

D.H.

UPSTAIRS DOWNSTAIRS

The judge, who lives impeccably upstairs
With dull decorum and its implication,
Has all his servants in to family prayers,
And edifies _his_ soul with exhortation.

Meanwhile his blacks live wastefully downstairs;
Not always chaste, they manage to exist
With less decorum than the judge upstairs,
And find withal a something that he missed.

This painful fact a Swede philosopher,
Who tarried for a fortnight in our city,
Remarked, one evening at the meal, before
We paralyzed him silent with our pity--

Saying the black man living with the white
Had given more than white men could requite.

H.A.

HAG-HOLLERIN' TIME

Black Julius peered out from the galley fly;
Behind Jim Island, lying long and dim;
An infra owl-light tinged the twilight sky
As if a bonfire burned for cherubim.

Dark orange flames came leering through the pines,
And then the moon's face, struggling with a sneeze,
Along the flat horizon's level lines
Her nostrils fingered with palmetto trees.

Her platinum wand made water wrinkles buckle;
Old Julius gave appreciative chuckle;
"It's jes about hag-hollerin' time," he said.
I watched the globous buckeyes in his head

Peer back along the bloody moon-wash dim
To see the fish-tailed water-witches swim.

H.A.

MACABRE IN MACAWS

After the hurricane of the late forties,
Peter Polite says, in the live-oak trees
Were weird, macabre macaws
And ash-colored cockatoos, blown overseas
From Nassau and the West Indies.
These hopped about like dead men's thoughts
Among the draggled Spanish moss,
Preening themselves, all at a loss,
Preening faint _caws_,
And shrieking from nostalgia--
With dull screams like a child
Born with neuralgia--
And this seems true to me,
Fitting the landscape's drab grotesquery.

H.A.

GAMESTERS ALL[7]

The river boat had loitered down its way;
The ropes were coiled, and business for the day
Was done. The cruel noon closed down
And cupped the town.
Stray voices called across the blindin