Color

Chapter 6: A Song of Praise

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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.

A Song of Praise

(For one who praised his lady’s being fair.)

YOU have not heard my love’s dark throat,

Slow-fluting like a reed,

Release the perfect golden note

She caged there for my need.

Her walk is like the replica

Of some barbaric dance

Wherein the soul of Africa

Is winged with arrogance.

And yet so light she steps across

The ways her sure feet pass,

She does not dent the smoothest moss

Or bend the thinnest grass.

My love is dark as yours is fair,

Yet lovelier I hold her

Than listless maids with pallid hair,

And blood that’s thin and colder.

You-proud-and-to-be-pitied one,

Gaze on her and despair;

Then seal your lips until the sun

Discovers one as fair.