In a 1970 article published in the Black Academy Review, Dudley Randall wrote of the African American people: “We are a nation of twenty-two million souls, larger than Athens in the Age of Pericles or England in the age of Elizabeth. There is no reason why we should not create and support a literature which will be to our own nation what those literatures were to theirs” (47).
As universal as Randall’s vision of an African American literature was, however, it was never prescriptive. “A poet is not a jukebox,” he asserts in his poem by the same title, “A poet writes about what he feels, what agitates his heart and sets his pen in motion.”
Sometimes what agitated Randall’s heart was political, as in his most famous poem, the “Ballad of Birmingham,” which was about bombing deaths of four little girls in a Birmingham church during the civil rights movement.
Other times, his pen was moved by love. In honor of Valentine’s day, here are two such poems, “delicate and lovely.”
Rosemary Weatherston
Director, Dudley Randall Center for Print Culture
“The brightness moved us softly”
Light flowed between black branches and new snow
into the shaded room and touched your eyes.
Your slow lids made another soft sun rise
upon your face, and as that morning glow
spread in your cheeks and blushed upon your lips,
the brightness moved us softly to a kiss.
“The Profile on the Pillow”
After our fierce loving
in the brief time we found to be together,
you lay in the half light
exhausted, rich,
with your face turned sideways on the pillow
and I traced the exquisite
line of your profile, dark against the white,
delicate and lovely as a child’s.
Perhaps
you will cease to love me.
or we may be consumed in the holocaust,
but I keep, against the ice and the fire,
the memory of your profile on the pillow.