Hello Friends,
In addition to being an accomplished poet, Robert Hayden was also a scholar of Black History, and many of his poems reflect this subject matter. The subject of this poem, Frederick Douglass, experienced Emancipation Day, but not true freedom, in his lifetime. Hayden imagines a day when his people will find that freedom.
DC celebrated the anniversary of its Emancipation Day on April 14 this year — though the actual date was April 16, 1862.
Enjoy.
Ellen
When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning in a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues' rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.
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