Georgia Douglas Johnson

A woman with a burning flame Deep covered through the years With ashes.  Ah! she hid it deep, And smothered it with tears. Sometimes a baleful light would rise From out the dusky bed, And then the woman hushed it quick To slumber on, as dead. At last the weary war was done The tapers were alight, And with a sigh of victory She breathed a soft—good-night!

Again we meet—a flashing glance, And then, to scabbard, goes the lance, While thoughts troop on in cavalcade Adown the wide aisles time has made. Back in the glow of yesterday, With tender troth you rode away, The sheen of rainbows in our eyes, That swept the rim of other skies. And now a writhing worm am I, Beneath a doomed love’s lensing eye, Let me but stagger, far from sight, To hide my anguish, in the night.

The phantom happiness I sought O’er every crag and moor; I paused at every postern gate, And knocked at every door; In vain I searched the land and sea, E’en to the inmost core, The curtains of eternal night Descend—my search is o’er.

I’m folding up my little dreams Within my heart tonight, And praying I may soon forget The torture of their sight. For time’s deft fingers scroll my brow With fell relentless art— I’m folding up my little dreams Tonight, within my heart.

Fierce is the conflict—the battle of eyes, Sure and unerring, the wordless replies, Challenges flash from their ambushing caves— Men, by their glances, are masters or slaves.

The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn, As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on, Afar o’er life’s turrets and vales does it roam In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home. The heart of a woman falls back with the night, And enters some alien cage in its plight, And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.

Her life was dwarfed, and wed to blight, Her very days were shades of night, Her every dream was born entombed, Her soul, a bud,—that never bloomed.

And who shall separate the dust What later we shall be: Whose keen discerning eye will scan And solve the mystery? The high, the low, the rich, the poor, The black, the white, the red, And all the chromatique between, Of whom shall it be said: Here lies the dust of Africa; Here are the sons of Rome; Here lies the one unlabelled, The world at large his home! Can one then separate the dust? Will mankind lie apart, When life has settled back again The same as from the start?