fauset

If this is peace, this dead and leaden thing,
   Then better far the hateful fret, the sting,
Better the wound forever seeking balm
   Than this gray calm!

Is this pain's surcease? Better far the ache,
   The long-drawn dreary day, the night's wide awake,
Better the choking sigh, the sobbing breath
   Than passion's death! (255)

Fauset, Jessie Redmon. "Dead Fires." The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. Ed. David Levering Lewis. New York: Penguin, 1994. 255.

bontemps

Mountains are rising all around me.
Some are so small they are not seen;
Others are large.
All of them get big in time and people forget
What started them at first.
Oh the world is covered in mountains!
Beneath each one there is something buried:
Some pile of wreckage that started it there.
Mountains are lonely and some are awful. (226)

Bontemps, Arna. "Golgatha Is a Mountain." The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. Ed. David Levering Lewis. New York: Penguin, 1994. 224-226.

hughes

There are people (you've probably noted it also) who have the unconscious faculty of making the world spin around themselves, throb and expand, contract and go dizzy. Then, when they are gone away, you feel sick and lonesome and meaningless.

In the chemistry lab at school, did you ever hold a test tube, pouring in liquids and powers and seeing nothing happen until a certain liquid or a certain powder is poured in and then everything begins to smoke and fume, bubble and boil, hiss to foam, and sometimes even explode? The tube is suddenly full of action and movement and life. Well, there are people like those certain liquids or powders; at a given moment they come into a room, or into a town, even into a country — and the place is never the same again. Things bubble, boil, change. Sometimes the whole world is changed. Alexander came. Christ. Marconi. A Russian named Lenin. (603)

Hughes, Langston. "Father and Son." The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. Ed. David Levering Lewis. New York: Penguin, 1994. 599-627.