Poetry by James Weldon Johnson (top reads .txt) 📕

most far corner of the night,
Who rounded the earth in the middle of His hand;
This Great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till He shaped it in His own image;

Then into it He blew the breath of life,
And man became a living soul.
Amen. Amen.

If homely virtues draw from me a tune
In happy jingle or a half-sad croon;
Or if the smoldering future should inspire
My hand to strike the seer’s prophetic lyre;
Or if injustice, brutishness and wrong
Should make a blasting trumpet of my song;
O God, give beauty and strength⁠—truth to my words,
Oh, may they fall like sweetly cadenced chords,
Or burn like beacon fires from out the dark,
Or speed like arrows, swift and sure, to the mark.

Colophon

Poetry
was compiled from poems published between 1899 and 1922 by
James Weldon Johnson.

This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Weijia Cheng,
and is based on transcriptions produced between 2004 and 2006 by
Suzanne Shell, Sankar Viswanathan, Charles M. Bidwell and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg (Fifty Years & Other Poems and The Book of American Negro Poetry)
and on digital scans available at the
Internet Archive (Fifty Years & Other Poems and The Book of American Negro Poetry)
and
Google Books.

The cover page is adapted from
The Lord Is My Shepherd,
a painting completed in 1863 by
Eastman Johnson.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.

The first edition of this ebook was released on
February 7, 2021, 10:17 p.m.
You can check for updates to this ebook, view its revision history, or download it for different ereading systems at
standardebooks.org/ebooks/james-weldon-johnson/poetry.

The volunteer-driven Standard Ebooks project relies on readers like you to submit typos, corrections, and other improvements. Anyone can contribute at standardebooks.org.

Uncopyright

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