The weary blues

Chapter 6: PROEM

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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.

PROEM

I am a Negro:

Black as the night is black,

Black like the depths of my Africa.

I’ve been a slave:

Caesar told me to keep his door-steps clean.

I brushed the boots of Washington.

I’ve been a worker:

Under my hand the pyramids arose.

I made mortar for the Woolworth Building.

I’ve been a singer:

All the way from Africa to Georgia

I carried my sorrow songs.

I made ragtime.

I’ve been a victim:

The Belgians cut off my hands in the Congo.

They lynch me now in Texas.

I am a Negro:

Black as the night is black,

Black like the depths of my Africa.