*Poet's Corner-Langston Hughes' Tribute To John Brown- "October 16"

http://www.uncp.edu/home/canada/work/canam/hughes.htm

Click on the title to link to an online biographic sketch of the life of the great Afro-American poet and militant Langston Hughes.

February Is Black History Month


October 16-Langston Hughes

Perhaps
You will remember
John Brown.

John Brown
Who took his gun,
Took twenty-one companions
White and black,
Went to shoot your way to freedom
Where two rivers meet
And the hills of the
North
And the hills of the
South
Look slow at one another-
And died
For your sake.

Now that you are
Many years free,
And the echo of the Civil War
Has passed away,
And Brown himself
Has long been tried at law,
Hanged by the neck,
And buried in the ground-
Since Harpers Ferry
Is alive with ghost today,
Immortal raiders
Come again to town-

Perhaps
You will recall
John Brown.