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Dark Blood


There were bizarre beginnings in old lands for the making
       of me. There were sugar sands and islands of fern and
       pearl, palm jungles and stretches of a never-ending sea.


There were the wooing nights of tropical lands and the cool
       discretion of flowering plains between two stalwart
       hills. They nurtured my coming with wanderlust. I
       sucked fevers of adventure through my veins with my
       mother's milk.


Someday I shall go to the tropical lands of my birth, to the
       coasts of continents and the tiny wharves of island
       shores. I shall roam the Balkans and the hot lanes of
       Africa and Asia. I shall stand on mountain tops and
       gaze on fertile homes below.


And when I return to Mobile I shall go by the way of
        Panama and Bocas del Toro to the littered streets and
       the one-room shacks of my old poverty, and blazing suns
       of other lands may struggle then to reconcile the pride
       and pain in me.

Written by Margaret Walker (1915-1998)

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