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The weary blues

Chapter 57: SUICIDE’S NOTE
By Langston Hughes
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About This Book

A poetry collection that interweaves blues and jazz rhythms with vivid portraits of Black life, longing, and resilience. Poems range from nightclub and street vignettes that mimic musical performance to quiet, lyrical meditations on memory and ancestry, including a powerful river motif that traces communal roots. The work moves through thematic sequences—nightclub scenes, dream variations, waterfront and seaside pieces, intimate domestic voices—shifting tone between melancholy, defiance, nostalgia, and playful improvisation. Short narratives and songlike lyrics evoke sailors, dancers, and everyday people while exploring aspirations, racial hardship, and the sustaining power of music and imagination.

SHADOWS IN THE SUN

BEGGAR BOY

What is there within this beggar lad
That I can neither hear nor feel nor see,
That I can neither know nor understand
And still it calls to me?
Is not he but a shadow in the sun—
A bit of clay, brown, ugly, given life?
And yet he plays upon his flute a wild free tune
As if Fate had not bled him with her knife!

TROUBLED WOMAN

She stands
In the quiet darkness,
This troubled woman,
Bowed by
Weariness and pain,
Like an
Autumn flower
In the frozen rain.
Like a
Wind-blown autumn flower
That never lifts its head
Again.

SUICIDE’S NOTE

The calm,
Cool face of the river
Asked me for a kiss.

SICK ROOM

How quiet
It is in this sick room
Where on the bed
A silent woman lies between two lovers—
Life and Death,
And all three covered with a sheet of pain.

SOLEDAD

A Cuban Portrait

The shadows
Of too many nights of love
Have fallen beneath your eyes.
Your eyes,
So full of pain and passion,
So full of lies.
So full of pain and passion,
Soledad,
So deeply scarred,
So still with silent cries.

TO THE DARK MERCEDES OF “EL PALACIO DE AMOR”

Mercedes is a jungle-lily in a death house.
Mercedes is a doomed star.
Mercedes is a charnel rose.
Go where gold
Will fall at the feet of your beauty,
Mercedes.
Go where they will pay you well
For your loveliness.

MEXICAN MARKET WOMAN

This ancient hag
Who sits upon the ground
Selling her scanty wares
Day in, day round,
Has known high wind-swept mountains,
And the sun has made
Her skin so brown.

AFTER MANY SPRINGS

Now,
In June,
When the night is a vast softness
Filled with blue stars,
And broken shafts of moon-glimmer
Fall upon the earth,
Am I too old to see the fairies dance?
I cannot find them any more.

YOUNG BRIDE

They say she died,—
Although I do not know,
They say she died of grief
And in the earth-dark arms of Death
Sought calm relief,
And rest from pain of love
In loveless sleep.

THE DREAM KEEPER

Bring me all of your dreams,
You dreamers.
Bring me all of your
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too rough fingers
Of the world.

POEM

(To F. S.)

I loved my friend.
He went away from me.
There’s nothing more to say.
The poem ends,
Soft as it began,—
I loved my friend.