February’s Poetry Pairing features Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “Invitation to Love” and a 2012 City Room blog post, “From a Familiar Stranger, a Poem Written on the Stars,” by Bill Hayes.
To view all the Poetry Pairings we’ve published in collaboration with the Poetry Foundation since 2010, and to find activity sheets to help with teaching them, visit our collection.
Poem
Born in Dayton, Ohio, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) is among the first influential black poets in American literature. Although his standard English poems are now considered his greatest achievements in verse, during his lifetime Dunbar’s dialect verse garnered nationwide attention. In addition to poetry, Dunbar’s oeuvre contains novels, short stories and essays which critics have deemed an impressive representation of African-American life at the turn of the 20th century.
Invitation to Love
By Paul Laurence Dunbar
Come when the nights are bright with stars
Or come when the moon is mellow;
Come when the sun his golden bars
Drops on the hay-field yellow.
Come in the twilight soft and gray,
Come in the night
or come in the day,
Come, O love, whene’er you may,
And you are welcome, welcome.
You are sweet, O Love, dear Love,
You are soft as the nesting dove.
Come to my heart and bring it to rest
As the bird flies home to its welcome nest.
Come when my heart is full of grief
Or when my heart is merry;
Come with the falling of the leaf
Or with the redd’ning cherry.
Come when the year’s first blossom blows,
Come when the
summer gleams and glows,
Come with the winter’s drifting snows,
And you are welcome, welcome.
Times Selection Excerpt
In “From a Familiar Stranger, a Poem Written on the Stars,” Bill Hayes writes about two unlikely encounters over a period of two and a half years with a man called Wolf Song.
I came to a gas station where 14 taxis were lined up for a single pump. I almost hopped in one but kept walking. I saw a pay phone up ahead — a pay phone! — and had to take a look. I flashed on how you had to plug them with quarters when making a long-distance call — the sound of the coins dropping, the magic of voices connecting, the disconsolate feeling when your coins ran out.
One man was using the phone, another leaning against the booth, as if waiting in line. The leaning man was very dark-skinned and striking-looking in his dark clothes, as if dressed for cold weather. He was holding a bouquet of white roses. He looked as if he lived on the streets.
I smiled at him and tipped my missing hat. “Gorgeous night,” I said, and I felt it was true, though the streets here were deserted and dirty; part of the gorgeousness in that moment was him and the old phone booth. He smiled back.
At the corner, I felt a presence and turned around. The man with roses was walking toward me very fast. The rose heads bobbed up and down against his chest, and I thought of a dozen bareheaded babies.
“I know you,” I heard him saying. “We’ve met.”
I did not rule this out. I have lived in New York only three years but have had many memorable encounters with strangers. More than once, I have had the same taxi driver twice. The man stopped in front of me and stared into my eyes, as if trying to read my mind. Then his eyes brightened. “Did I write a poem for you?” he said.
I stared back, searching my memory. A curtain lifted: Winter, 2009. Two in the morning. A snowstorm. I get out of a cab at Seventh and Christopher, and see a homeless-looking man on the corner. I give him the five bucks left from my cab fare. He thanks me but says he never takes something for nothing. All he can give me is a poem in return. He gives me a list of options.
“A love poem, of course,” I request. And so he stands there, in the whirling snow, and recites by heart a poem about love — and being about love, about heartbreak. The words go from his mouth to my ears and are carried off by the wind. Two and a half years later, on a different corner but under the same sky, we meet again.
“Billy, I’m going to write another poem for you,” he said. His name, he reminded me, was Wolf Song. He wanted to write it down for me this time. Neither of us had anything to write with. “Will you buy me a pen?” the poet asked.
… “We need some paper, Billy,” he said.
There was a scrap of newspaper on the sidewalk, torn from The Times. He picked it up. Something caught my eye: “Look, there’s a map of the sky.” I recognized the Sunday “Sky Watch” column — a chart of the constellations.
Wolf Song looked stunned. He said he’d been thinking about a poem about the sky all day long. “It was meant to be, then,” I said. “Will you write it on the stars for me?”
Here are two activity sheets you can use with any edition of this feature — and you might also check out the Poetry Foundation’s page of Articles for Teachers and Students:
For more poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar, visit the Poetry Foundation’s collection.