Color

Chapter 69: She of the Dancing Feet Sings

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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.

She of the Dancing Feet Sings

(To Ottie Graham)

“AND what would I do in heaven, pray,

Me with my dancing feet,

And limbs like apple boughs that sway

When the gusty rain winds beat?

And how would I thrive in a perfect place

Where dancing would be sin,

With not a man to love my face,

Nor an arm to hold me in?

The seraphs and the cherubim

Would be too proud to bend

To sing the faery tunes that brim

My heart from end to end.

The wistful angels down in hell

Will smile to see my face,

And understand, because they fell

From that all-perfect place.”