Trip: San Francisco

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.