After the Winter
Claude McKay
Some day, when trees have shed their leaves And against the morning’s white The shivering birds beneath the eaves Have sheltered for the night, We’ll turn our faces southward, love, Toward the summer isle Where bamboos spire to shafted grove And wide-mouthed orchids smile. And we will seek the quiet hill Where towers the cotton tree, And leaps the laughing crystal rill, And works the droning bee. And we will build a cottage there Beside an open glade, With black-ribbed blue-bells blowing near, And ferns that never fade.
Of note
This dream of a tropical island first appeared in The Liberator in July 1919, in the same seven-poem spread that introduced McKay's defiant sonnet "If We Must Die." Max Eastman, who ran the magazine, presented the poet to readers as a dining-car waiter.
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TEXT PROVENANCE · First published as “After the Winters” in The Liberator (July 1919) · Text from Harlem Shadows (1922), via Project Gutenberg.
Harlem Shadows (1922), Project Gutenberg ebook 64989
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