“Bouquet” by Langston Hughes

Chihuly, Dale_Kobe Japan Workshop Ikebana Drawing
Dale Chihuly (American, 1941–), Kobe Japan Workshop Ikebana Drawing, 1997. Mixed media on paper. Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.

Gather quickly
Out of darkness
All the songs you know
And throw them at the sun
Before they melt
Like snow.

This poem was originally published in the Colorado Review’s Spring/Summer 1957 issue, and it appears in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad (Knopf, 1994; Vintage Books, 1995).

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s