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Paul Laurence Dunbar


     (for Herbert Martin)

     We lay red roses on his grave,
speak sorrowfully of him
as if he were but newly dead


     And so it seems to us
this raw spring day, though years
before we two were born he was
     a young poet dead.


     Poet of our youth-
his "cri du coeur" our own,
his verses "in a broken tongue"


     beguiling as an elder
brother's antic lore.
Their sad blackface lilt and croon
     survive him like


     The happy look (subliminal
of victim, dying man)
a summer's tintypes hold.


     The roses flutter in the wind;
we weight their stems
with stones, then drive away.

Written by Robert Hayden (1913-1980)

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