From No Lonesome Road: Selected Prose and Poems by Don West (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), page 147:


THERE'S ANGER IN THE LAND
Don West

Note: In the summer of 1950 I picked up a Negro hitchhiker in South Georgia and brought him across the Chattahoochee at Eufala, Alabama. As we crossed the river he began telling me the story of how his brother was lynched and his body cut down from the limb and flung across the doorstep of his mother's shack—broken, bleeding and lifeless.

Oh, there's grieving in the plum-grove
And there's weeping in the weeds,
There is sorrow in the shanty
Where a broken body bleeds.

For there's been another lynching
And another grain of sand
Swells the mountain of resentment—
Oh, there's anger in the land!

And a woman broods in silence
Close beside an open door
Flung across the flimsy door-step
Lies a corpse upon the floor!

You'll not ask me why I'm silent;
Thus the woman spoke to me.
Her two eyes blazed forked anger
And her throat throbbed agony.

Let the wind go crying yonder
In the tree-tops by the spring,
Let its voice be soft and feeling
Like it was a living thing.

Once my heart could cry in sorrow
Now it lies there in the floor
In the ashes by the hearth-stone—
They can't hurt it anymore!

Did you ever see a lynching,
Ever see a frenzied mob
Mill around a swaying body
When it's done the hellish job?

Yes, the night was full of terror
And the deeds were full of wrong
Where they hung him to a beech-wood
After beating with a thong.

There's grieving in the plum-grove
And there's sobbing in the sand,
There is sorrow in the shanties—
And there's anger in the land!

[This poem was originally published in The Road is Rocky by Don West (1951). It was set to music by Hedy West.

[Don West (1906-1992) was the father of Hedy West (1938-2005).]