Richard Wright, Haiku Poet

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Venturing outdoors,
The children walk timidly,
Respecting the snow.

Or this:

A soft wind at dawn
Lifts one dry leaf and lays it
Upon another.

Or this:

Even my old friends
Seem like newly met strangers
In this first snowfall.

Wright's haiku begin to fill in the missing part of his legacy. Com-posed with near-manic intensity in the last 18 months of his life, when he was ill and living in Paris, they reveal a side of Wright that the public never saw. We see his soul struggling to hang onto itself, to remember what it feels like to be a person, not a spokesman. The poems reflect his emotions, not what the publishing world, with its predigested categories of what a black man is capable of thinking and writing, would allow him to portray. It was a struggle that both Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin also faced, a struggle that most black artists and perhaps all artists face. So what of the man who wrote this:

That frozen star there,
Or this one on the water,-
Which is more distant?

And this:

This autumn evening
Is full of an empty sky
And one empty road.

Who was he? I'd like to imagine a way of understanding him that doesn't begin and end with 'black': poet, patriot, brave heart, brave soul, a hungry pilgrim, like the rest of us, on the road and lonely for something he could call home.

Anthony Walton is the author of Miss-issippi: An American Journey (Vintage, 1997). From The Oxford American (Nov./Dec. 1999). Subscriptions: $19.95/yr. (6 issues) from Box 1963, Marion, OH 43306.

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