Juice Joint: Northern City

There is a gin mill on the avenue
Where singing black boys dance and play each night 
Until the stars pale and the sky turns blue
And dawn comes down the strect all wanly white. 
They sell beer foaming there in mug-like cups, 
Gin is sold in glasses finger-tall.
Women of the streets stop by for sups 
Of whiskey as they start out for a ball. 
Sometimes a black boy plays a song 
That once was sung beneath the sun 
In lazy far-off drowsy Southern days 
Before this long hegira had begun 
   That brought dark faces 
   And gay dancing feet 
   Into this gin mill
   On this city street.

Play your guitars, grinning night-dark boys, 
And let your songs drift through the swinging doors. 
Let your songs hold all the sunny joys
That goad black feet to dancing on bare floors. 
Let those women with their lips too red
Turn from the bar and join you in your song,
And switch their skirts and lift their straightened heads 
To sing about the men who've done them wrong—
While blues as mellow as the Southern air 
And weary as a drowsy Southern rain 
Echo the age-less, age-long old despair 
That fills a woman's age-less, age-long pain- 
   As every swaying
   Guitar-playing boy 
   Forgets he ever sang 
   A song of joy.

O, in this tavern on the city street
Where black men come to drink and play and sing, 
And women, too, whom anyone may meet 
And handle casy like a purchased thing,
Where two old brown men stand behind the bar— 
Still after hours pouring drinks the law forbids— 
Dark dancers dance and dreamers seek a star 
And some forget to laugh who still are kids. 
But suddenly a guitar-playing lad
Whose languid lean brings back the sunny South 
Strikes up a tune all gay and bright and glad 
To keep the gall from biting in his mouth,
   Then drowsy as the rain
   Soft sad black feet
   Dance in this juice joint 
   On the city street.