Ashley Bryan (1923–2022)
Trip: San Francisco (from Sail Away), 2015
Collage of cut colored papers with graphite and printed text mounted on a tracing paper overlay
The Morgan Library & Museum, Gift of the Ashley Bryan Center; 2021.25:15
Courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. (p) 1990. Used by permission.
© 2022 The Ashley Bryan Center. Used with Permission.
Sandy Campbell: Hughes’s friend and collaborator Arna Bontemps was also an accomplished poet. Here he reads Hughes’s poem “Trip: San Francisco,” which was first published in a collection that Bontemps edited, Golden Slippers: An Anthology of Negro Poetry for Young Readers.
Arna Bontemps: “San Francisco” by Langston Hughes. I went to San Francisco, I saw the bridges high, spun across the water like cobwebs in the sky. In the morning, the city spreads its wings making a song and stone that sings. In the evening, the city goes to bed, hanging lights above its head.