Welcome back to the Daily Poem here in the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is another poem by Langston Hughes. I've read a few of his poems here on this podcast.

He lived from 1902 to 1967. He was an American poet and activist and novelist and playwright.

He wrote many, many poems, poems of course and is best known as a member a leader of the Harlem Renaissance the poem that I'm

going to read today is a well it's a summer themed poem and it's called summer Night. This is how it goes. The sounds of the Harlem

night drop one by one into stillness. The last player piano was closed. The last

Victrola ceases with the jazz boy blues.

The last crying baby sleeps and the night becomes still as a whispering heartbeat.

I toss without rest in the darkness, weary as the tired night.

My soul, empty as the silence, empty with a vague aching emptiness desiring

needing someone

something

I toss without rest in the darkness

until the new dawn

wan and pale

descends like a white mist

into the courtyard.

To say that Langston Hughes's poetry is jazz-like,

is it almost just to parody commentary on Langston Hughes.

Or to say that it's like the blues or something like that, is to sort of make a mockery of, I think, commentary on his work and of his work itself.

But those kind of things are said for a reason. And in a sense, when you read a poem like this, you get the sense that he was at least inspired by jazz music, right, or even by the blues to some extent. There's a sort of freedom to the way that he's

approaching it. There's almost a stream of consciousness as if one idea is leading into the next in a way

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