Helene Johnson - 4 Short Poems (1925-26)

Forgotten Poems #70: Harlem Renaissance

              —: Trees At Night :—

       Slim sentinels
       Stretching lacy arms
       About a slumbrous moon;
       Black quivering
       Silhouettes,
       Tremulous,
       Stencilled on the petal
       Of a bluebell;
       Ink spluttered
       On a robin’s breast;
       The jagged rent
       Of mountains
       Reflected in a
       Stilly sleeping lake;
       Fragile pinnacles
       Of fairy castles;
       Torn webs of shadows;
       And
       Printed 'gainst the sky—
       The trembling beauty
       Of an urgent pine.
   

   
              —: My Race :—

       Ah my race,
       Hungry race,
       Throbbing and young—
       Ah, my race,
       Wonder race,
       Sobbing with song—
       Ah, my race,
       Laughing race,
       Careless in mirth—
       Ah, my veiled
       Unformed race,
       Fumbling in birth.
   

  
              —: Futility :—

       It is silly—
       This waiting for love
       In a parlor.
       When love is singing up and down the alley
       Without a collar.
   

Emily Rutter: “Conveying a boldly feminist outlook, Johnson contrasts the alley where sexual desire is freed from class strictures with the sterile parlor where women are stripped of their agency and forced to wait patiently for socially sanctioned courtship.”

    
              —: Love in Midsummer :—

       Ah love
       Is like a throbbing wind,
       A lullaby all crooning,
       Ah love
       Is like a summer sea's soft breast.
       Ah love's
       A sobbing violin
       That naive night is tuning,
       Ah love
       Is down from off the white moon's nest.
   

Helene Johnson (1906-1995); “Born twenty years ago in Boston, Massachusetts, where she received her early education and attended Boston University for a short time. A year ago she came to New York to attend the Extension Division of Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Opportunity, Vanity Fair and several New York dailies; and has been reprinted in Palms, The Literary Digest, and Braithwaite's Anthology.” (Caroling Dusk, 1927) After moving to New York, became a prominent member of the ‘Harlem Renaissance’, along with poets like Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Bennett, Lewis Alexander, Anne Spencer, et al. Noted some of her favourite poets were “Whitman, Tennyson, Shelley, and Carl Sandburg,” and also that she enjoyed “theatre, tennis, dancing, hiking, and rowing.” (Anthology of Magazine Verse, 1926)

“Johnson’s subversion of the dominant cultural memory of the 1920s, which by the 1960s had long been predicated on T.S. Eliot’s representation of the modern city as a chaotic and decaying “waste land,” enhances ongoing efforts to correct the critical neglect of ‘New’ black women poets whose work has historically been relegated to the sidelines by the predominantly male Anglo-American literary establishment. Moreover, examining Johnson’s post-Renaissance poems proves that, although she ceased publishing after 1935, she continued to write and evolve her poetic stance.” (Emily R. Rutter, ‘Helene Johnson’s Late Poetry and the Rhetoric of Empowerment’, 2014)

    
              —: For Helene Johnson :—
                        by Dick Whyte

       old pine
       you don't care
       a damn
       who sits here—

       shade
       where light
       devoured by your
       flesh
       transforms,

       leaves scattered
       prophecies
       no-one but the earth
       knows how
       to read

       old pine,
       stitch together
       past, present, future—
       needles
       rattling
       in a mountain wind
   

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