Tired, Langston Hughes

To wrap up April, a month of seemingly nothing but poems, I’ve circled back to a poet I haven’t read as much in my adult life as I did when I was a teen, Langston Hughes. Hughes was the founder and leader of the Harlem Renaissance movement, an activist and a journalist. “Tired,” from 1931, somehow reaches across the time and sums up just how I feel in 2024 when I look at the world, go online, or turn on cable news. In part, it reads, “I am so tired of waiting / aren’t you / for the world to become good / And beautiful and kind?”
I grew up in a swing state and, for a time, studied International Relations at a tony university. I’ve read the books, done the dirty work, hit the bricks, debated, protested, yadda and etc., but I’ve also understood the urgency of the political a bit more acutely because I didn’t come from a place of economic privilege and the ills of the world weren’t hidden from me. This isn’t a political column and I don’t care to make it one, but I have spoken privately to many people since returning to Wyoming to attend to family and estate matters, and always found a certain commonality, despite what the world seems to tell me is the case (and even what some of these strangers believe). Stripping away the semantics and catchy slogans, it’s been made so clear to me, throughout my life, that most people simply want to live well, but also care for each other, to leave the world a bit better than they found it.
It’s where my mind goes looking back at this poem. I think I read it for the first time when I was 13 or 14, but I’m no longer sure. “Let us take a knife / And cut the world in two,” writes Hughes, “And see what worms are eating / at the rind.”
We live in deeply strange times. We are simultaneously more connected than ever, but also more divided. Our minds are shaped inside echo chambers courtesy of complex algorithms. We are more depressed and less optimistic. We bicker, endlessly, about basic facts and goodness, and are thus made willing fools, and for whom? And for what? To what end?
I’ve long believed there is enough for all of us to live well and care for each other, but I confess that I am tired. I am tired of how we ignore each other. I am tired of convenient scapegoats. I am tired of how we are so quick to judge and tired of how we cast aspersions and stones against those we deem too different, too other, too undesirable. I am tired of being asked to wait a while longer for overdue change. I am tired of being promised a future in exchange for my hard work and resilience only to discover that said future was a mirage on a horizon that I spent years running toward. I am tired of division, and I am tired of hate and anger being the dominant emotions which govern our wider society and culture. I am tired of inhumanity. I am tired of being expected to take these things on the chin, to chock it up to ‘people are people’ and ‘life is unfair’ and me being ‘naïve [to expect anything else].’
And I am tired of being told to accept this nihilistic point-of-view as fact because all it does is chip away at the basic essence of a person, which is, of course, the point. If you believe change (and goodness and kindness and beauty) are impossible, you will not demand it for yourself or others around you.
Our problems, at their core, are not new. The fact that a poem written during the Great Depression can echo these sentiments in much plainer, more concise terms is proof of that. But I also don’t believe that our problems being new or old is indicative of anything other than there being work that needs done so that we might better our lot and our world.