LANGSTON HUGHES TRIBUTE ISSUE Hayes Davis   AMERICA after teaching Claude McKay's sonnet We discuss Harlem Renaissance poetry. But discuss is the wrong verb at least at the beginning of class when their silent stares focus on their desks—they don't look at each other, and no one looks at me, not even the one black student in class. I wonder if his shoulders slump at the silence as much as mine have— I wonder if like me he fights the desire to leave the room, frustrated by the unspoken— what is it? Guilt? Defiance? Belief that Obama's election has burned off the fog of oppression, rendered irrelevant the laments of the past? Do they fear a word dropped careless in the room? When one hand breaks the stillness, and I tiptoe with language that at once focuses on and obscures race, dancing instead through scansion, poetic devices, allaying their fear of a screaming indictment or a stern reminder of what their ancestors did to mine. The conversation warms, spreads, moves cautiously but safely to the ending couplet. When the black student reads "I Too Sing America" I know he hears himself in the poem and I hold him back after class, ask if I can hug him, and I fight back tears as we walk out into the hallway.       Hayes Davis is a high school English teacher and founding member of Cave Canem. His work has been published in Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC, Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade, and Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, and the journals New England Poetry Review, Poet Lore, Gargoyle,and the Delaware Poetry Review. He lives in Silver Spring, MD.   Published in Volume 12, Number 1, Winter 2011.   To read more by this author: Hayes Davis