Robert Hayden Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

Midnight Special on a sabre track movering movering,
first stop Mercy and the last Hallelujah.

Robert Hayden
As you continue writing and rewriting, you begin to see possibilities you hadn't seen before. Writing a poem is always a process of discovery.

Robert Hayden
Shuttles in the rocking loom of history,
the dark ships move, the dark ships move,
their bright ironical names
like jests of kindness on a murderer's mouth

Robert Hayden
As well have a talon as a finger, a muzzle as a mouth,
as well have a hollow as a heart.

Robert Hayden
Middle Passage:
voyage through death
to life upon these shores.

Robert Hayden
Harriet Tubman,

woman of earth, whipscarred,
a summoning, a shinning

Mean to be free

Robert Hayden
Runs falls rises stumbles on from darkness into darkness
and the darkness thicketed with shapes of terror
and the hunters pursuing and the hounds pursuing
and the night cold and the night long and the river
to cross and the jack-muh-lanterns beckoning beckoning
and blackness ahead

Robert Hayden
Naked, he lies in the blinded room
chainsmoking, cradled by drugs, by jazz
as never by any lover's cradling flesh.

Robert Hayden
He X'd his name, became his people's anger,
exhorted them to vengeance for their past;
rebuked, admonished them,
their scourger who
would shame them, drive them from
the lush ice gardens of their servitude.

Robert Hayden
Quadroon mermaids, Afro angels, black saints
balanced upon the switchblades of that air
and sang. Tight streets unfolding to the eye
like fans of corrosion and elegiac lace
crackled with their singing: Shadow of time. Shadow of blood.

Robert Hayden
Killing people to save, to free them?
With napalm lighting routes to the future?

Robert Hayden
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

Robert Hayden
Confess i am curiously drawn unmentionable to
the americans doubt i could exist among them for
long however psychic demands far too severe
much violence much that repels i am attracted
none the less their variousness their ingenuity
their élan vital and that some thing essence
quiddity i cannot penetrate or name

Robert Hayden
Your presence was shore where I rested/ released from the hoodoo of that dance, where I spoke/ with my true voice again.

Robert Hayden
Here among them the americans this baffling
multi people extremes and variegations their
noise restlessness their almost frightening
energy

Robert Hayden
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.

Robert Hayden
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

Robert Hayden
Standing to America, bringing home
black gold, black ivory, black seed.

Robert Hayden
This freedom, this liberty, this beautiful and terrible thing, needful to man as air, usable as earth.

Robert Hayden
Art is not escape, but a way of finding order in chaos, a way of confronting life.

Robert Hayden
Oh who and oh who will sing Jesus down
to help with struggling and doing without and being colored
all through blue Monday?
Till way next Sunday?

Robert Hayden
This man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered.

Robert Hayden