Helene Johnson - 5 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.”
—: Mother :— Soft hair faintly white where the angels touch it; Pale candles flaming in her eyes Hallowing her vision of Christ; And yet I know She would break each Commandment Against her heart, And bury them pointed and jagged in her soul— That I may smile.
—: 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
Forgotten Poets Presents:
Forgotten Poems, a living anthology of obscure and out-of-print poetry from the late-1800s and early-1900s. Explore the archives:
More African American poetry . . .
More poems about mothers . . .
Hello! I was searching around to see if I could find any of Helene Johnson's early short stories (no luck) and I came across your fascinating Substack. This is a lovely collection but I believe that "Mother" is by Helene Mullins; correct me if I'm wrong. I love the Harlem Renaissance poets. I also like what you've presented on Gwendolyn B. Bennett — who was a true Renaissance woman!
Oh, holy, holy, "Futility" is so great—that parlor/collar near-rhyme is brilliant.