—: Night :—
The moonlight:
Juice flowing from an over-ripe pomegranate
bursting
The cossack-crested palm trees:
motionless
The leopard spotted shade:
inciting fear
silence seeds sown . . .
Lewis G. Alexander (1898-1945)
P: The Crisis (1923+), Opportunity (1925+), Fire!! (1926), Palms (1926), Ebony & Topaz (1927); A: The New Negro (1925), Caroling Dusk (1927), etc.
“Born July 4, 1900, at Washington D.C.; educated in the public schools of Washington and at Howard University where he was a member of the Howard Players. He has also studied at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a member of the Ethiopian Art Theatre for the season 1922-1923 playing in Salome and The Comedy of Errors on Broadway. As the result of a recent tour of North and South Carolina he edited in May 1927 the Negro Number of the Carolina Magazine. Two theatre groups in Washington, The Ira Aldridge Players of the Grover Cleveland School and the Randall Community Center Players, have been under his direction. He has been writing poetry since 1917, specializing in Japanese forms [like tanka and hokku].” (Caroling Dusk, 1927)
Prominent early English-language haiku and tanka poet, drawing on the work of John Gould Fletcher and Yone Noguchi. One of the founders of Fire!!, with Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, Zora Neale Hurston, Aaron Douglas, John P. Davis, Richard Bruce Nugent, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Countee Cullen.
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