wilderness of waves,
dip and dive, rise and roll, hide
a desert of waves
The sea is a wilderness of waves,
A desert of water.
We dip and dive,
Rise and roll,
Hide and are hidden
On the sea.
Day, night,
Night, day,
The sea is a desert of waves,
A wilderness of water.
Long Trip by Langston Hughes, in Poetry, compiled from poems published between 1921 and 1928.
when Carl Sandburg sings
I know a lover of all
the living sings then
In his autobiography, The Big Sea, Langston Hughes writes about his time a Cleveland Central High School:
Ethel Weimer discovered Carl Sandburg for me. Although I had read of Carl Sandburg before—in an article, I think, in the Kansas City Star about how bad free verse was—I didn’t really know him until Miss Weimer in second-year English brought him, as well as Amy Lowell, Vachel Lindsay, and Edgar Lee Masters, to us. Then I began to try to write like Carl Sandburg.
Little Negro dialect poems like Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s and poems without rhyme like Sandburg’s were the first real poems I tried to write. I wrote about love, about the steel mills where my step-father worked, the slums where we lived, and the brown girls from the South, prancing up and down Central Avenue on a spring day.
… about Carl Sandburg, my guiding star, I wrote:
Carl Sandburg’s poems
Fall on the white pages of his books
Like blood-clots of song
From the wounds of humanity.
I know a lover of life sings
When Carl Sandburg sings.
I know a lover of all the living
Sings then
rain plays a little
sleep song on our roof at night
… and I love the rain
April Rain Song
Let the rain kiss you
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops
Let the rain sing you a lullaby
The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk
The rain makes running pools in the gutter
The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night
And I love the rain.
From The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes, 1994 by Alfred A. Knopf.
It’s been dry.
It’s been dry here in the Low Country of South Carolina.
One mile from the Atlantic Ocean and there isn’t enough water on the land, despite how much water is next to the land.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture, the Low Country is Abnormally Dry but not in a drought.
And it has started to rain.
A storm has anchored itself off the coast of South Carolina and the lows and highs and storm fronts have locked this storm into place over head and it is going to rain.
It will most likely rain for the next day.
It might rain for the next two days.
It could rain for the next three days.
As you might guess, it is Memorial Day Weekend.
I think that pretty much guarantee’s rain for the next three days.
We live in an ocean side resort community.
People have put a lot of time, money and effort into arranging a Memorial Day vacation at the shore.
I think that pretty much guarantee’s rain for the next three days.
We live in the south of South Carolina.
Life here is designed to be lived outdoors.
Miles of beaches, acres of golf courses and very little opportunity to do anything under cover or indoors.
I think that pretty much guarantee’s rain for the next three days.
I think of the weather jokes I learned during 20 years of working in local TV news.
What do you call the day that follows two days of rain?
Monday!
By law, the seventh day of a seven day forecast is always warm and sunny. You just never get to that seventh day …
Turn a frown upside down … you get rain in your nose.
It is so true that everyone talks about the weather but no one does anything about it.
And I can’t do anything about it.
I guarantee rain for the next three days.
So I will watch it.
So I will listen to it.
And without other options, I will love it.
Let the rain kiss you
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops
Let the rain sing you a lullaby
The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk
The rain makes running pools in the gutter
The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night
And I love the rain.
no clocks no shadows
dawn dusk neither light nor dark
outside door no door
There are
No clocks on the wall,
And no time,
No shadows that move
From dawn to dusk
Across the floor.
There is neither light
Nor dark
Outside the door.
There is no door!
Selected poems of Langston Hughes
by Langston Hughes, 1990, Vintage Books
still, how strangely still
water is today, not good
to be still that way
Adapted from the poem, Sea Calm by Langston Hughes as it appeared in The Weary Blues (Alfred A. Knopf, 1926) .
How still,
How strangely still
The water is today.
It is not good
For water
To be so still that way
Langston Hughes was just twenty-four years old when his debut poetry collection The Weary Blues was published in 1926.
The first line of the introduction to The Weary Blues reads, “At the moment I cannot recall the name of any other person whatever who, at the age of twenty -three, has enjoyed so picturesque and rambling an existence as Langston Hughes.“
Back in the day when I worked at WZZM13 TV in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I remember a newsroom discussion about travel and places to go and places gone to and plans to go to other places.
I looked up and said in what my wife calls ‘My Hoffman Voice’, you know, the voice you develop in a family of 11 kids if you ever want anyone to hear you – my kids say it cuts through concrete – my Mom said it was just like my brother Bobby’s (who was a baseball coach for 20 years), “I live in house 1 mile from where I grew up, 1 mile from the hospital where I was born and 1 mile from the cemetery where I will be buried.”
Then I said, “Oh am I depressed!”
At the time it was all true.
I lived near Kent Country Club on the North End of Grand Rapids.
It was less than a mile from my childhood home on Sligh Blvd.
It was about a mile to Butterworth Hospital where I was born.
And it was less than a mile from Fairplains Cemetery where my grand parents and parents are buried and where, most likely, I would end up one day.
I was about to turn 50.
Since then, I can say that I have enjoyed a picturesque and rambling existence.
Someone looked at my life and said it was still, too still.
And then that someone decided that it was not good for my life to be still that way.
I am reminded of a silly movie starring Steve Martin named Parenthood.
Mr. Martin watches his life come apart at the seams with the flu, bills, car accidents, kids fighting, job loss and everything else and is ready to lose it.
When his Grandma comes by and kind of in passing says:
You know, when I was 19, Grandpa took me on a roller coaster
Up, down, up, down. Oh, what a ride.
I always wanted to go again.
You know, it was just interesting to me that a ride could make me so frightened,
so scared,
so sick,
so excited
and so thrilled,
all together.
Some didn’t like it.
They went on the merry-go-round.
That just goes around … Nothing.
I like the roller coaster.
You get more out of it.
The movie was written by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel.
These two guys wrote a lot of movies.
One of those was, A League of Their Own where baseball manager Jimmy Dugan, played by Tom Hanks, says:
It’s supposed to be hard.
If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it.
The hard… is what makes it great.
It is not good
For water
To be so still that way
