"Summertime and the Living..."
Nobody planted roses, he recalls, but sunflowers gangled there sometimes,
tough-stalked and bold
and like the vivid children there unplanned.
There circus-poster horses curveted in trees of heaven
above the quarrels and shattered glass, and he was bareback rider of them all.
No roses there in summer-
oh, never roses except when people died-
and no vacations for his elders, so harshened after each unrelenting day
that they were shouting-angry.
But summer was, they said, the poor folks' time of year.
And he remembers how they would sit on broken steps amid
The fevered tossings of the dusk, the dark,
wafting hearsay with funeral-parlor fans
or making evening solemn by their quietness.
Feels their Mosaic eyes upon him,
though the florist roses that only sorrow could afford long since have bidden them Godspeed.
Oh, summer summer summertime-
Then grim street preachers shook
their tamborines and Bibles in the face
of tolerant wickedness;
then Elks parades and big splendiferous Jack Johnson in his diamond limousine
set the ghetto burgeoning with fantasies
of Ethiopia spreading her gorgeous wings.
-Hayden; 1966