{
 "id": "georgia-douglas-johnson/hegira",
 "title": "Hegira",
 "ordinal": null,
 "subtitle": null,
 "poet": "Georgia Douglas Johnson",
 "poet_slug": "georgia-douglas-johnson",
 "language": "en",
 "book": "Bronze: A Book of Verses",
 "book_slug": "bronze",
 "book_kind": "volume",
 "sequence": 13,
 "container": null,
 "epigraph": null,
 "first_published": {
  "year": 1922,
  "venue": "Bronze: A Book of Verses (1922)",
  "note": "First located printing is this volume; an earlier periodical printing has not been established.",
  "uncertain": false,
  "sources": [
   "https://archive.org/details/bronzebookofvers00john"
  ]
 },
 "source": {
  "kind": "standard-ebooks",
  "repo": "standardebooks/georgia-douglas-johnson_poetry",
  "file": "poetry.xhtml",
  "upstream": [
   "https://scalar.lehigh.edu/african-american-poetry-a-digital-anthology/georgia-douglas-johnson-the-heart-of-a-woman-full-text-1918",
   "https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/103153234",
   "https://scalar.lehigh.edu/african-american-poetry-a-digital-anthology/georgia-douglas-johnson-bronze-full-text-1922",
   "https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000781515",
   "https://scalar.lehigh.edu/african-american-poetry-a-digital-anthology/poems-by-georgia-douglas-johnson-in-the-new-negro-1925",
   "https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000340210",
   "https://scalar.lehigh.edu/african-american-poetry-a-digital-anthology/georgia-douglas-johnson-an-autumn-love-cycle-full-text-1928",
   "https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/102777177",
   "https://scalar.lehigh.edu/african-american-poetry-a-digital-anthology/georgia-douglas-johnson-poems-published-in-the-crisis-1910-1926",
   "https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000502434",
   "https://scalar.lehigh.edu/african-american-poetry-a-digital-anthology/poems-published-in-the-messenger-magazine",
   "https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000056822",
   "https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000064962"
  ],
  "rights": "public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931)"
 },
 "verification": {
  "level": "structural-only",
  "last_checked": "2026-08-12"
 },
 "stats": {
  "n_lines": 18,
  "n_stanzas": 6,
  "n_parts": 0,
  "longest_line_chars": 102,
  "max_indent": 0
 },
 "site_ready": true,
 "parts": [],
 "stanzas": [
  [
   {
    "text": "Oh, black man, why do you northward roam, and leave all the farm lands bare?",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Is your house not warm, tightly thatched from storm, and a larder replete your share?",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And have you not schools, fit with books and tools the steps of your young to guide?",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Then what do you seek, in the north cold and bleak, ’mid the whirl of its teeming tide?",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ],
  [
   {
    "text": "I have toiled in your cornfields, and parched in the sun, I have bowed ’neath your load of care,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I have patiently garnered your bright golden grain, in season of storm and fair,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "With a smile I have answered your glowering gloom, while my wounded heart quivering bled,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Trailing mute in your wake, as your rosy dawn breaks, while I curtain the mound of my dead.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ],
  [
   {
    "text": "Though my children are taught in the schools you have wrought, they are blind to the sheen of the sky,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "For the brand of your hand, casts a pall o’er the land, that enshadows the gleam of the eye,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "My sons, deftly sapped of the brawn-hood of man, self-rejected and impotent stand,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "My daughters, unhaloed, unhonored, undone, feed the lust of a dominant land.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ],
  [
   {
    "text": "I would not remember, yet could not forget, how the hearts beating true to your own,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "You’ve tortured, and wounded, and filtered their blood ’till a budding Hegira has blown.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ],
  [
   {
    "text": "Unstrange is the pathway to Calvary’s hill, which I wend in my dumb agony,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Up its perilous height, in the pale morning light, to dissever my own from the tree.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ],
  [
   {
    "text": "And so I’m away, where the sky-line of day sets the arch of its rainbow afar,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "To the land of the north, where the symbol of worth sets the broad gates of combat ajar!",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ]
 ]
}