I first read Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in 1981 when I was living in Chicago. It was part of a volume of Hughes’s poetry that I bought in a used bookstore that was just north of the Loop near an Irish bar that I used to frequent. In my mind now they were right across the street from one another, the bar and the bookstore… but I suspect that time has minimized distances. They may very well have been blocks apart.

It was a place I went to often to spend the afternoon with coffee or Guinness depending on my mood. I usually sat in a booth off the bar and read, most often Yeats or theology. The day I bought the Hughes volume and started reading it the bartender asked what I was reading. He often asked about the books I was reading. I told him Langston Hughes.

“He isn’t Irish,” he said. “But I like the poem about rivers.”

I remember finding the poem in the table of contents and reading it. Later that evening when I was going to meet some friends, I remember walking along the Chicago river with the words of the poem stuck in my head. It has always been one of my favorites

The past years with the madness that is Trump, Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” has come to my mind many times.

Read the poem once or twice yourself. Then listen to a clip of Hughes reading this poem: click here.

Enjoy!

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.

Listening with a Pencil and My Ear

There are a lot of lines that I have underlined. But it is the refrain that reverberates most in my ear:

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Since first reading this poem, I have stood on the banks of many rivers. These lines go through my mind every time. They have even changed the way I see especially now one of the two rivers in my backyard: The Mississippi. That is the beauty and power of poetry. That is a poet and the height of their craft.