Frank Marshall Davis

The moon pours liquid beams on hard white snow that hit with a splash then freeze to nothingness

while the wind laughs at pines thoughtful shivering sighing for spring leaning on hills coldly defiant guarding bodies of dead streams in hard coffins of smoky gray ice.

Who knows?

Perhaps the cloudless night is a veil of dull black silk set with small white diamonds and one yellow pearl to cover the face of the infinite from the vulgar gaze of man.

Your love was a warm, yellow light shining through white windows of a green cabin as I stood alone at dusk in the black forest of my loneliness.

My body ached from weariness my soul cried out for comfort I entered I thought that smiling mask . . . that lovely smiling mask . . . was you.

I asked for food you gave me dried bones on a wooden platter. I asked for drink you gave me brine in a cracked glass.

Yet I was content I had starved so long. And the night was dark.

But you should never have let me see the day then how could I know the hut was filled with the rotting forms of other fools like me?

A great oak brown face, a strange face with inch and a half eyes placed three inches above two mustache guarded lips has Joe, a seller of hotdogs on State Street A seventy year old voice has this man of fifty . . . his eyes seldom see what they gaze upon . . . he appreciates words unspoken better—much better—than those one says Joe swims in a sea of yesterdays . . . memories of better times beat against his mind like a lash . . . his lips tell tales while his hands make a living "Way back down home" he says while brown hands paint red frankfurters a thick yellow with French's mustard "I used to didn't know no trouble . . . but the Wah came and I lost two sons and my wife died and I came up No'th . . ." He sells another and still he sees dreamed-of things with his eyes while his hands make a living . . .

Come to me in the baby hours of morning . . . when the moon is a full grown woman letting her platinum veil trail from heaven . . . before high hills toss a yellow sun into the sky like a boy with a rubber ball Let us meet beside a cool tall pine with stars in her hair . . . only a pine . . . the thin green fingers of grass . . . and the small hushed voices of woodfolk I must sense you as you come to me . . . the warmth of you like a rolling prairie fire . . . scaring flame . . . eating into my mind with sharp hot teeth Moon slivers, sun parings, a basket of ripened dreams . . . show me these lovely things again . . . We shall not speak, you and I, nor let flesh touch flesh . . . the eagle of silence must not fly away . . . nor the pot of passion be set to boil We shall watch the slow treading slave night carry a burden of a million stars on his black back and I shall know you, too . . . are a star . . . a pine seeking the moon . . . the green fingers of grass pointing the way And when the gray slants of day scourge night from the sky I shall look around but you will be gone . . . the moon mother . . . and you . . . gone . . . how can a fighting man-day know dreams . . . peace . . . rest . . . the silence of night things? Yet there will be other new baby mornings, moon kissed, star cradled . . . knowing this . . . I too shall go . . .

Through jail windows a new full moon is a round white door rendered useless by stout steel bars Frogs see a new full moon as a luminous toadstool sprouting from the black floor of a pond To the thief and the murderer it is a busy stoolpigeon tipping off cops and intended victims To a young man in love the new full moon is a priceless pearl he would tear from the sky . . . set in a ring woven from sparkling stars . . . place on the finger of his sweetheart's hand The new full moon is a beautiful woman . . . ageless . . . deathless . . . inaccessible . . . and infinitely mysteriously sad . . . who gazes in my window through a dark veil set with shimmering stars . . . the poet said "A new full moon," the scientist stated, "is a periodical phenomenon occurring when the lifeless half of our planetary satellite revolves to such a position that solar rays are reflected from the whole of its atmosphereless surface to our own stellar body . . ."

I would sing a song but I have no words I would hum a tune but I have no melody

success like grains of brown sand at the sea-shore slips through my nerveless fingers

the world has not time even to laugh.

A tom-tom sun awakens day's jungle with heat beats The moon was a white war canoe moored to the night Morning stars scurry to cover like shaking hares fearful of the Great Yellow Hunter

Last night's tall hunchback fishing in a pool of raven's breasts is a green elm tree Thin wings of grass pound helplessly against hard ground And the robins are no longer afraid . . .