My Dear Readers:
In celebration of Black History Month, an annual observance in the United States and Canada in February, I am pleased to introduce you to Haiku: The Last Poems of An American Icon, written by Richard Wright (1908-1960), one of the early forceful and eloquent spokesmen for black Americans, author of Native Son and Black Boy.
Richard Wright discovered the haiku in the last eighteen months of his life. He attempted to "capture, through his sensibility as an African-American, the elusive Zen discipline and beauty in depicting man's relationship, not only to his fellow man as he had in the raw and forceful prose of his fiction, but to the natural world."
The following are Richard Wright's haiku selected for Black History Month:
Their watching faces,
as I walk the autumn road
make me a traveler
I am nobody:
A red sinking autumn sun
Took my name away.
From a tenement,
The blue jazz of a trumpet
Weaving autumn mists
In a dank basement
a rotting sack of barley
swells with sprouting grain
In a drizzling rain,
In a flower shop’s doorway,
A girl sells herself
In the falling snow
A laughing boy holds out his hands
Until they turn white.
Happy Reading
Chen-ou
FYI: for more about black haiku, see Special Feature: Black Haiku: The Uses of Haiku by African American Poets.
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