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Pauli Murray
Friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, multi-racial in heritage though seen as “Negro,” influencer of the Supreme Court and of Civil Rights Era leaders, lesbian, respected professor, eventually an Episcopal priest — Pauli Murray was an impressive person!
In her very busy and productive life, among all her other efforts, she wrote poetry, poetry among my most admired. The longer poem, “Dark Testament” is in memory of Stephen Vincent Benet (whom I often think of as my favorite poet, for his epic and Pulitzer-Prize-Winning “John Brown’s Body”). The book is dedicated to the memory of Eleanor Roosevelt.
Meet Some of Her Poetry
(from Dark Testament and Other Poems)
Hate (p 51)
… When man hates
His clumsy hands drip human blood,
And where, in some quiet land
White goats danced on a hillside
Or children gathered flowers,
A thousand puny skulls
Give feast to flies and maggots.
Dark Testament, section 9 (p14)
This section of her longer poem shows the brutality of greed, the usefulness of hate in promoting greed and domination, the necessity of oppression and of cultivating hate, of cultivating fraud and bullshit. Lots of application to our public life today 🙁
Pity the poor who hate —
Wild brood of earth’s lean seasons —
Pity the poor, the land-robbed whites,
Driven by planters to marshy back-lands,
Driven by fevers, pellagra and hookworm,
Driven to hate niggers warm in their cabins,
The nigger fed on scraps from the Big House,
The nigger’s hands on a fine tall coach-whip,
The half-white nigger in a rich man’s kitchen.
Give ’em a chance they’d burn that nigger,
Burn ‘im on a tree in the swamp-lands,
Teach ‘im not to eat while white men hungered,
Teach ‘im that even God is white
And had no time for niggers’ praying,
Teach ‘im that the devil is black
And niggers were the sons of evil.
Pity slave and serf in their misery,
Bound by common fate to common destiny.
Prophecy (1969, p66)
“Prophecy”, or I might say “the American.”
I sing of a new American
Separate from all others,
Yet enlarged and diminished by all others.
I am the child of kings and serfs, freemen and slaves,
Having neither superiors nor inferiors,
Progeny of all colors, all cultures, all systems, all beliefs.
I have been enslaved, yet my spirit is unbound.
I have been cast aside, but I sparkle in the darkness.
I have been slain but live on in the rivers of history.
I seek no conquest, no wealth, no power, no revenge;
I seek only discovery
Of the illimitable heights and depths of my own being.
Dinner for Three (p72)
She was not all melancholy – here’s one where she clearly expresses the beauty she found in human love.
There were three who sat and drank of wine,
On food and laughter they fed,
They talked of worlds that hurtled by,
Yet of love — not one word was said.
But love was there, ah love was there —
Brighter than candle light,
The brave, the tender and the fair
Were hosts to love that night.
Pauli Murray (Anna Pauline Murray), 1910-1985, Wikipedia article.
A quite helpful documentary: My Name is Pauli Murray
The brief intro by Elizabeth Alexander in this book of Murray’s poems, Dark Testament and Other Poems, is valuable and moving.
See Also:
– Let America Be America Again – Langston Hughes
– Wislawa Szymborska, Poem: Cleaning Up The Mess(es)
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Questions for us:
1. She puts “slave” and “serf” together as objects for pity. How legit is that?
2. “I am the child of kings and serfs, freemen and slaves.” There must be reasons we forget two of those. I wonder why?
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