Page:Negro poets and their poems (IA negropoetstheirp00kerl).pdf/167

rest of the sequence being as yet unpublished. Instead of pillaging this sequence, marring the effect of the individual Alice Dunbar-Nelson member so dislocated, I will take from her compilation, The Dunbar Speaker^[1] so named for her first husband, the poet, two of her original poems. The first is a war poem, doubtless, but the occasion is immaterial. The spirit of rebellion against confinement to the petty thing while the something big calls afar might be evoked into play by any of a hundred situations.

I SIT AND SEW

I sit and sew—a useless task it seems,
My hands grown tired, my head weighed down with dreams—
The panoply of war, the martial tread of men,
Grim-faced, stern-eyed, gazing beyond the ken

1. The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer, containing the best prose and poetic selections by and about the Negro Race, with programs arranged for special entertainments. Edited by Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson. J. L. Nichols & Co., Naperville, Ill.