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Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem

1906 –

1995

You are disdainful and magnificent—
Your perfect body and your pompous gait,
Your dark eyes flashing solemnly with hate,
Small wonder that you are incompetent
To imitate those whom you so despise—
Your shoulders towering high above the throng,
Your head thrown back in rich, barbaric song,
Palm trees and mangoes stretched before your eyes.
Let others toil and sweat for labor’s sake
And wring from grasping hands their meed of gold.
Why urge ahead your supercilious feet?
Scorn will efface each footprint that you make.
I love your laughter arrogant and bold.
You are too splendid for this city street.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on February 25, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

Helene Johnson was a poet and writer of the Harlem Renaissance movement.

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About this Poem

“Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem” was first published in Countee Cullen’s anthology Caroling Dusk (Harper & Brothers, 1927). In Chapter Nineteen of A Companion to Modernist Poetry (Wiley, 2014), Karen Jackson Ford, professor of English at the University of Oregon, writes that the poem “equates the sonnet’s formal mastery and authority with its subject’s artful performance of racial identity. [. . .] If the sonnet’s history as the form of love poetry par excellence serves the speaker’s expression of admiration for the Negro sauntering through Harlem, it simultaneously casts his portrait in an esteemed poetic genre that will not be effaced by racist scorn. Still in print nearly a century later, the poem has preserved ‘each footprint’ of the celebrated Negro in the measured feet of poetic tradition.”

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Magalu

Summer comes.
The ziczac hovers
’Round the greedy-mouthed crocodile.
A vulture bears away a foolish jackal.
The flamingo is a dash of pink
Against dark green mangroves,
Her slender legs rivalling her slim neck.
The laughing lake gurgles delicious music in its throat

Helene Johnson

1927

Poem

Little brown boy,
Slim, dark, big-eyed,
Crooning love songs to your banjo
Down at the Lafayette—
Gee, boy, I love the way you hold your head,
High sort of and a bit to one side,
Like a prince, a jazz prince. And I love
Your eyes flashing, and your hands,

Helene Johnson

1927

What Do I Care for Morning

What do I care for morning,
For a shivering aspen tree,
For sun flowers and sumac
Opening greedily?
What do I care for morning,
For the glare of the rising sun,
For a sparrow’s noisy prating,
For another day begun?
Give me the beauty of evening,

Helene Johnson

1926

Poems

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Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem

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