I was on a country train in Derbyshire when the young man sitting opposite opened a Waterstones bag to take out a large format thick paperback which he regarded with obvious expectation & pleasure. I was a bit surprised because he didnt look much like the reading type, (I had him marked as junior management) & anyway Im always nosy about what other people are reading.
I managed to glimpse the authors name & Collected Poems on the cover. This only added to the intrigue. To be honest I thought he was most likely a modern singer/songwriter, but even I would have expected to have heard of someone who had produced such an oeuvre, worthy of publication by a mainstream publisher.
I remembered the name some time later & checked the library catalogue. I was hooked & read everything I could find His first volume of autobiography The Big Sea deserves to be, ought to be, much more widely known in this country
THE NEGRO SPEAKS OF RIVERS
I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I've known rivers:
Ancient dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
Langston Hughes. Written 1919, when he was 19, on a train outside St Louis, on his way to visit his father in Mexico
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