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Cane

Chapter 7: FACE
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About This Book

The work assembles lyric sketches, poems, and short stories that move between the rural Black South and the urban North, rendering scenes of field labor, small-town intimacies, migration, and city struggle. Its language blends musical, imagistic poetry with prose vignettes, shifting tone from sensual celebration and folklore to psychological tension and spiritual searching. Structurally divided into three parts, it juxtaposes primitive southern evocations, a middle section of urban self-consciousness, and a return offering more meditative, symbolic pieces. Recurring themes include racial identity, desire, community, and the search for meaning through artistic and spiritual expression.

FACE

Hair—
silver-gray,
like streams of stars,
Brows—
recurved canoes
quivered by the ripples blown by pain,
Her eyes—
mist of tears
condensing on the flesh below
And her channeled muscles
are cluster grapes of sorrow
purple in the evening sun
nearly ripe for worms.