How still,
How strangely still
The water is today.
It is not good
For water
To be so still that way.
– Langston Hughes, circa 1932
I am neither a poet, nor a poetry scholar. I am simply an admirer of the stillness it demands of the reader or listener. Both of my daughters attended a middle school named after Langston Hughes. Not knowing much about him, I started reading some of his work and found it to be insightful and meaningful for the time it was written. After all, Hughes spent a large part of his life in DC which is memorialized at the local coffee shop Busboys and Poets. Hughes spent time working as a busboy at the Wardman Hotel (which will soon be an apartment complex in Woodley Park).
This particular verse seemed appropriate for the moment, as well as the photo. My photo is in the marsh area around Shelter Cove, Hilton Head Island.
