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Chapter 9: To a Brown Girl
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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.

To a Brown Girl

(For Roberta)

WHAT if his glance is bold and free,

His mouth the lash of whips?
So should the eyes of lovers be,
And so a lover’s lips.
What if no puritanic strain
Confines him to the nice?
He will not pass this way again,
Nor hunger for you twice.
Since in the end consort together
Magdalen and Mary,
Youth is the time for careless weather:
Later, lass, be wary.