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Chapter 59: Oh, for a Little While Be Kind

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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.

Oh, for a Little While Be Kind

(For Ruth Marie)

OH, for a little while be kind to me

Who stand in such imperious need of you,

And for a fitful space let my head lie

Happily on your passion’s frigid breast.

Although yourself no more resigned to me

Than on all bitter yesterdays I knew,

This half a loaf from sumptuous crumbs your shy

Reneging hand lets fall shall make me blest.

The sturdy homage of a love that throws

Its strength about you, dawn and dusk, at bed

And board, is not for scorn. When all is said

With final amen certitude, who knows

But Dives found a matchless fragrance fled

When Lazarus no longer shocked his nose?