Color

Chapter 78: On Going

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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.

On Going

(For Willard Johnson)

A GRAVE is all too weak a thing

To hold my fancy long;

I’ll bear a blossom with the spring,

Or be a blackbird’s song,

I think that I shall fade with ease,

Melt into earth like snow,

Be food for hungry, growing trees,

Or help the lilies blow.

And if my love should lonely walk,

Quite of my nearness fain,

I may come back to her, and talk

In liquid words of rain.