Song for a Dark Girl

Way down south in Dixie, Bena, I was born. It was the pale moonlight, That watched our love, that mourned.

I loved a man, Black as the night, And we had our way, By shadows dim and white.

But they took my love away— Like a flower which clings, To the bough too frail to hold. And his heart sang deep, but lost, For I would let him be.

In the pale moonlight, it came; And I lost my love, lost my home. Way down in Dixie, past black and white, No light but his song echoed into the dawn.

—Langston Hughes

• Langston Hughes