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Things Said When He Was Gone

1896 –

1972

My branch of thoughts is frail tonight
As one lone-wind-whipped weed.
Little I care if a rain drop laughs
Or cries; I cannot heed

Such trifles now as a twinkling star,
Or catch a night-bird’s tune.
My whole life is you, to-night,
And you, a cool distant moon.

With a few soft words to nurture my heart
And brighter beams following love’s cool shower
Who knows but this frail wind-whipped weed
Might bear you a gorgeous flower!

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on February 2, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.

Blanche Taylor Dickinson was a poet, short story writer, and journalist associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Dickinson was born to Laura and Thomas Taylor on a farm near Franklin, Kentucky, on April 15, 1896. She received her education in various public schools before enrolling at Bowling Green Academy. She then attended Simmons College of Kentucky (then Simmons University) in Louisville, a private, historically-Black college, but earned no degree.

About Blanche Taylor Dickinson

Themes

About this Poem

“Things Said When He Was Gone” by Blanche Taylor Dickinson appears in the anthology Ebony and Topaz: A Collectanea (National Urban League, 1927), edited by Charles S. Johnson. In her 1977 essay, “Rewriting Afro-American Literature: A Case for Black Women Writers,” poet and educator [Akasha] Gloria T. Hull wrote in the section titled “Tracing a Black Female Literary Tradition”: “[W]omen writers are generally isolated—from each other as well as from the mainstream. Very few mentor relationships exist between older and younger writers […] Notable exceptions are the Harlem Renaissance—Georgia Douglas Johnson’s circle—and the present group of New York City-based writers. However, there does exist a tradition of support, in which black women writers give each other the precedent and the courage to write—and to write about their black female experience. A minor poet in Caroling Dusk, Blanche Taylor Dickinson, numbered among her favorite poets Edna St. Vincent Millay and Georgia Douglas Johnson. Because Johnson, especially, had written before her about personal issues of black womanhood such as physical appearance, she could write a poem like ‘Revelation,’ which tells the story of a girl dazzled by store window displays, who bought a dress, waved her ‘soft black hair,’ and applied cosmetics to make herself ‘neat and fair.’”

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Four Walls

Four great walls have hemmed me in.
Four strong, high walls:
Right and wrong,
Shall and shan’t.
The mighty pillars tremble when
My conscience palls
And sings its song—
I can, I can’t.

Blanche Taylor Dickinson

1927

To an Icicle

Chilled into a serenity
As rigid as your pose
You linger trustingly,
But a gutter waits for you.
Your elegance does not secure
You favors with the sun.
He is not one to pity fragileness.
He thinks all cheeks should burn
And feel how tears can run.

Blanche Taylor Dickinson

1927

That Hill

It crawled away from ’neath my feet
And left me standing there;
A little at a time, went up
An atmospheric stair.

I couldn’t go for watching it,
To see where it would stop;
A tree sprang out and waved to me
When it had reached the top.

Blanche Taylor Dickinson

1927

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Things Said When He Was Gone

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