Here are a few select poems by Robert Hayden:

The Whipping

Robert Hayden

The old woman across the way

            is whipping the boy again

and shouting to the neighborhood

            her goodness and his wrongs.

Wildly he crashes through elephant ears,

            pleads in dusty zinnias,

while she in spite of crippling fat

            pursues and corners him.

She strikes and strikes the shrilly circling

            boy till the stick breaks

in her hand. His tears are rainy weather

            to woundlike memories:

My head gripped in bony vise

            of knees, the writhing struggle

to wrench free, the blows, the fear

            worse than blows that hateful

Words could bring, the face that I

            no longer knew or loved…

Well, it is over now, it is over,

            and the boy sobs in his room,

And the woman leans muttering against

            a tree, exhausted, purged-

avenged in part for lifelong hidings

            she has had to bear.

Those Winter Sundays

Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Frederick Douglass

Robert Hayden

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty,

            this beautiful

and terrible thing, needful to man as air,

usable as the earth; when it belongs at last to our

            children,

when it is truly instinct, brainmatter, diastole, systole,

reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:

this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro

beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world

where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,

this man, superb in love and logic, this man

shall be remembered- oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,

not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,

but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives

fleshing his dream of the needful beautiful thing.

Hayden, Robert. (1997). I Am The Darker Brother: An Anthology of Modern Poems By African Americans

(1913-1980)

        Robert Hayden, born Asa Bundy Sheffey in Detroit, Michigan, was raised in a slum called Paradise Valley. Hayden’s parents separated soon after his birth and he became the foster child of Sue Ellen Westerfield and William Hayden. He earned his BA (1936) from Detroit City College, later renamed Wayne State University, and between 1936 and 1938 participated in the Detroit Federal Writer’s Project. His studies with W.H. Auden at the University of Michigan, where he earned his MA (1944), had a profound impact on his poetry. After graduation he accepted a professorship at Fisk University in Nashville where he would remain for over twenty years. In 1969 he returned to teach at Michigan until his death.