Color

Chapter 21: The Dance of Love

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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.

The Dance of Love

(After reading René Maran’s “Batouala”)

ALL night we danced upon our windy hill,

Your dress a cloud of tangled midnight hair,

And love was much too much for me to wear

My leaves; the killer roared above his kill,

But you danced on, and when some star would spill

Its red and white upon you whirling there,

I sensed a hidden beauty in the air;

Though you danced on, my heart and I stood still.

But suddenly a bit of morning crept

Along your trembling sides of ebony;

I saw the tears your tired limbs had wept,

And how your breasts heaved high, how languidly

Your dark arms moved; I drew you close to me;

We flung ourselves upon our hill and slept.