The eastward spurs tip backward from the sun. <br />Nights runs an obscure tide round cape and bay <br />and beats with boats of cloud up from the sea <br />against this sheer and limelit granite head. <br />Swallow the spine of range; be dark. O lonely air. <br />Make a cold quilt across the bone and skull <br />that screamed falling in flesh from the lipped cliff <br />and then were silent, waiting for the flies. <br /> <br />Here is the symbol, and climbing dark <br />a time for synthesis. Night buoys no warning <br />over the rocks that wait our keels; no bells <br />sound for the mariners. Now must we measure <br />our days by nights, our tropics by their poles, <br />love by its end and all our speech by silence. <br />See in the gulfs, how small the light of home. <br /> <br />Did we not know their blood channelled our rivers, <br />and the black dust our crops ate was their dust? <br />O all men are one man at last. We should have known <br />the night that tidied up the cliffs and hid them <br />had the same question on its tongue for us. <br />And there they lie that were ourselves writ strange. <br /> <br />Never from earth again the coolamon <br />or thin black children dancing like the shadows <br />of saplings in the wind. Night lips the harsh <br />scarp of the tableland and cools its granite. <br />Night floods us suddenly as history <br />that has sunk many islands in its good time.<br /><br />Judith Wright<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/niggers-leap-new-england/
