Color

Chapter 68: Suicide Chant

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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.

Suicide Chant

I AM the seed

The Sower sowed;

I am the deed

His hand bestowed

Upon the world.

Censure me not

If a rank weed flood

The garden plot,

Instead of a bud

To be unfurled.

Bridle your blame

If the deed prove less

Than the bruited fame

With which it came

From nothingness.

The seed of a weed

Cannot be flowered,

Nor a hero’s deed

Spring from a coward.

Pull up the weed;

Bring plow and mower;

Then fetch new seed

For the hand of the Sower.