Color

Chapter 10: To a Brown Boy

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About This Book

A collection of tightly crafted lyrics that probe racial identity, aesthetic aspiration, and personal longing. The poet alternates intimate love poems and public meditations, drawing on classical, religious, and contemporary imagery. Recurring themes include the pain and pride of Black experience, the tension between artistic vocation and social constraint, and reflections on mortality and faith. Formally, poems move between sonnet-like lyrics, epigrams, narrative vignettes, and elegies, marked by musical diction, formal control, and occasional irony. Together the pieces balance tenderness and critique to examine how beauty, suffering, and creative voice intersect under social pressures.

To a Brown Boy

THAT brown girl’s swagger gives a twitch

To beauty like a queen;

Lad, never dam your body’s itch

When loveliness is seen.

For there is ample room for bliss

In pride in clean, brown limbs,

And lips know better how to kiss

Than how to raise white hymns.

And when your body’s death gives birth

To soil for spring to crown,

Men will not ask if that rare earth

Was white flesh once, or brown.