I am so tired of waiting.
Aren’t you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two—
And see what worms are eating
At the rind.
Langston Hughes, “Tired”
To my American colleagues, I am anxious for your future. Who knows what will happen to post-secondary education under the new presidential administration? As a Canadian, I can only hope that new policies and orders do not migrate to the Great White North, who’s own education system is under threat by another populist leader.
Looking to Langston Hughes’ prescient words, for his time and ours, gives us hope for calls to action. I envision this throughout post-secondary institutions, including academic libraries. I saw Hughes’ poem on social media Tuesday evening, but could not determine which of his books of poetry “Tired” came from. After some searching in our library catalogue and finding several anthologies of Hughes’ work, I found “Tired” was not in any of his poetry collections, but thankfully, our library has plenty of Hughes’ anthologies, including The Collected Works of Langston Hughes and The Langston Hughes Reader. I–of course–had to go to our library’s second floor to read a physical copy of the poem, which I found in several volumes of Hughes poems that our humanities collection has (pictured above).
It’s worth taking the time to process, but also to consider what happens next, and how we, as academic librarians, take action.