Making Statements (The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes)

“Bombings in Dixie

It is not enough to mourn
And not enough to pray
Sackcloth and Ashes anyhow,
Save for another day

For the Lord God Himself
Would hardly desire
That men be burned to death—
And bless the fire.”

~~Langston Hughes, 1964

I purchased The Collected Works of Langston Hughes in 1995, while working in a small bookshop in Monterey, California after four years of military life and one year of flailing around at a University had made me long for a quiet life of among the books.


This book of poetry is the only thing I could possibly read after a day like today. The only comfort I might take after hours filled with news coverage, trying to keep my mind on a job working with children (normally stressful but joyous) while adjusting it to the horrors I witnessed this morning sitting on the couch staring wide-eyed at television coverage of planes running into buildings and buildings collapsing on people and people dying (a logical progression). This poem replayed in my mind--I’d written it on the cover of one of my notebooks the semester I studied Langston Hughes in an African American Studies course. Because there are things we shouldn’t forget.

Tonight I lay in bed, and couldn’t speak. I showed my husband this poem as he lay next to me, my outrage pinching the air between us.

In turn he showed me the poem on the following page.

“Mother in Wartime

As if it were some noble thing,
She spoke of sons at war,
As if freedom’s cause
Were pled anew at some heroic bar,
As if the weapons used today
Killed with great élan,
As if Technicolor banners flew
To honor modern man—
Believing everything she read
In the daily news
(No in-between to choose)
She thought that only
One side won,
Not that BOTH
Might lose.”

~~Hughes

This Collection runs the gamut of human emotion. There is blood, guts and raw (sometimes irritatingly so) emotion on every page of poetry in this collection. Hughes made a statement (without actually harming a soul) every time he picked up his pen to write (imagine if he’d had a computer). He didn’t waste words on anything he had no feeling for and his poems bled this passion. He spoke of love, of poverty, of communism and racism. He talks about death and sorrow, he speaks of romance and dreams…

“Bird in Orbit

Those who contribute most to the joy of living and the stretching of the social elastic are not stymied by foolish questions, but keep right on drawing from the well of the past buckets of water in which to catch stars. In their pockets are layovers for meddlers—although somewhere grandma lost her apron.” ~~Hughes


Hughes has been one of my favorite poets since my first reading of ‘A Dream Deferred,’ one of the most famous of his works. Today I think of him as I think of the as yet untold numbers, as I think of all the people who fight for causes without shedding blood. As I think about those who put themselves in harm’s way to save another. As I think of the outrage I feel at the ability of one man to hate another simply because of race or nationality and to use that hatred to reign down terror on innocent people.

Just to ‘make a statement.’

The only statements I comprehend are worked out in the words of thoughtful men and women. And through the actions of men and women who give their lives to save others and do it not to ‘make a statement,’ but because it is the only thing they CAN do.