DuBose Heyward

From “Charleston Poems”

THEY tell me she is beautiful, my city,

That she is colorful and quaint; alone

Among the cities. But I—I who have known

Her tenderness, her courage, and her pity;

Have felt her forces mold me, mind and bone,

Life after life, up from her first beginning—

How can I think of her in wood and stone!

To others she has given of her beauty:

Her gardens, and her dim old faded ways;

Her laughter, and her happy drifting hours;

Glad spendthrift April, squandering her flowers;

The sharp still wonder of her autumn days;

Her chimes, that shimmer from St. Michael’s steeple

Across the deep maturity of June

Like sunlight slanting over open water

Under a high blue listless afternoon.

But when the dusk is deep upon the harbor,

She finds me where her rivers meet and speak,

And while the constellations gem the silence

High overhead, her cheek is on my cheek.

I know her in the thrill behind the dark

When sleep brims all her silent thoroughfares.

She is the glamour in the quiet park

That kindles simple things like grass and trees;

Wistful and wanton as her sea-born airs,

Bringer of dim rich age-old memories.

Out on the gloom-deep water, when the nights

Are choked with fog, and perilous, and blind,

She is the faith that tends the calling lights.

Hers is the stifled voice of harbor bells,

Muffled and broken by the mist and wind.

Hers are the eyes through which I look on life

And find it brave and splendid. And the stir

Of hidden music shaping all my songs,

And these my songs, my all, belong to her.