Juke Box Love Song, a poem by Langston Hughes

Image Credit: www.poets.org

James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry. Hughes is best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the period that "Harlem was in vogue." 

He won numerous awards such as the Witter Bynner Undergraduate Poetry Prize in 1926, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935, the Spingarn Medal by the NAACP in 1960 and the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1961, to name a few.

Hughes' Poetry collections:
The Weary Blues, Knopf, 1926
Fine Clothes to the Jew, Knopf, 1927
The Negro Mother and Other Dramatic Recitations, 1931
Dear Lovely Death, 1931
The Dream Keeper and Other Poems, Knopf, 1932
Scottsboro Limited: Four Poems and a Play, Golden Stair Press, N.Y., 1932
Let America Be America Again, 1938
Shakespeare in Harlem, Knopf, 1942
Freedom's Plow, 1943
Fields of Wonder, Knopf, 1947
One-Way Ticket, 1949
Montage of a Dream Deferred, Holt, 1951
Selected Poems of Langston Hughes, 1958
Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz, Hill & Wang, 1961
The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times, 1967
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, Knopf, 1994

Juke Box Love Song

By Langston Hughes

I could take the Harlem night

and wrap around you,

Take the neon lights and make a crown,

Take the Lenox Avenue busses,

Taxis, subways,

And for your love song tone their rumble down.

Take Harlem's heartbeat,

Make a drumbeat,

Put it on a record, let it whirl,

And while we listen to it play,

Dance with you till day--

Dance with you, my sweet brown Harlem girl. 

* This poem is found in public domain.