Nobody

“I am nobody:
A red sinking autumn sun
Took my name away.

Keep straight down this block,
Then turn right where you will find
A peach tree blooming.

Make up you mind, Snail!
You are half inside your house,
And halfway out!

You moths must leave now;
I am turning out the light
And going to sleep.

All right, You Sparrows;
The sun has set and you can now
Stop your chattering!

Sparrow's excrement
Becomes quickly powdery
On sizzling pavements.

With a twitching nose
A dog reads a telegram
On a wet tree trunk.

Leaving its nest,
The sparrow sinks a second,
Then opens its wings.

Crying and crying,
Melodious strings of geese
Passing a graveyard.

Holding too much rain,
The tulip stoops and spills it,
Then straightens again.

Like a spreading fire,
Blossoms leap from tree to tree
In a blazing spring.

Leaving the doctor,
The whole world looks different
this autumn morning.

I almost forgot
To hang up an autumn moon
Over the mountain.

A freezing morning:
I left a bit of my skin
On the broomstick handle.

A spring sky so clear
That you feel you are seeing
Into tomorrow.

I feel autumn rain
Trying to explain something
I do not want to know.

The Christmas season:
A whore is painting her lips
Larger than they are.

While she undresses,
A spring moon touches her breasts
For seven seconds.

My cigarette glows
Without my lips touching it, —
A steady spring breeze.

A nude fat woman
Stands over a kitchen stove,
Tasting applesauce.

I am paying rent
For the lice in my cold room
And the moonlight too.

Across the table cloth,
Ants are dragging a dead fly
In the evening sun.

Just enough of snow
To make you look carefully
At familiar streets.

A sick cat seeks out
A stiff and frozen willow
Under which to die.

That sparrow bent dawn,
Its head tucked beneath its wing, –
Sewing a button?

In the summer sun,
Near an empty whiskey bottle,
A sleeping serpent.

In the burning sun,
A viper's tongue is nudging
A cigarette butt.

On my trouser leg
Are still a few strands of fur
From my long dead cat.

Why did this spring wood
Grow so silent when I came?
What was happening?”

~ “Richard Wright (1908-1960), one of the early forceful and eloquent spokesmen for black Americans, author of "Native Son," and "Black Boy", was also, it turns out, a major poet. During the last eighteen months of his life, he discovered and became enamored of haiku, the strict seventeen-syllable Japanese form. Wright became so excited about the discovery that he began writing his own haiku, in which he attempted to capture, through his sensibility as an African American, the same Zen discipline and beauty in depicting man's relationship, not to his fellow man as he had in his fiction, but to nature and the natural world.
In all, he wrote over 4,000 haiku, from which he chose, before he died, the 817 he preferred. Rather than a deviation from his self-appointed role as spokesman for black Americans of his time, Richard Wright's haiku, disciplined and steeped in beauty, are a culmination: not only do they give added scope to his work but they bring to it a universality that transcends both race and color without ever denying them.

Wright wrote his haiku obsessively--in bed, in cafes, in restaurants, in both Paris and the French countryside. His daughter Julia believes, quite rightly, that her father's haiku were "self-developed antidotes against illness, and that breaking down words into syllables matched the shortness of his breath." They also offered the novelist and essayist a new form of expression and a new vision: with the threat of death constantly before him, he found inspiration, beauty, and insights in and through the haiku form. The discovery and writing of haiku also helped him come to terms with nature and the earth, which in his early years he had viewed as hostile and equated with suffering and physical hunger. Fighting illness and frequently bedridden, deeply upset by the recent loss of his mother, Ella, Wright continued, as his daughter notes, "to spin these poems of light out of the gathering darkness."