ARNA BONTEMPS

Yet would we die as some have done, beating a way for the rising sun.

How dare anyone, parent, schoolteacher, or merely literary critic, tell me not to act colored.

Let us keep the dance of rain our fathers kept and tread our dreams beneath the jungle sky.

Is there something we have forgotten? Some precious thing we have lost, wandering in strange lands?

Yet would we die as some have done, beating a way for the rising sun.

Is there something we have forgotten? Some precious thing we have lost, wandering in strange lands?

How dare anyone, parent, schoolteacher, or merely literary critic, tell me not to act colored.

Let us keep the dance of rain our fathers kept and tread our dreams beneath the jungle sky.