The Black Christ, & other poems

Chapter 17: Never the Final Stone

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About This Book

A debut collection of formally polished poems that moves between intimate lyric and public meditation, exploring love, youth, mortality, faith, and racial identity. The poet employs sonnets and varied forms, classical and Christian imagery, and musical rhythms to examine personal feeling and communal injustice, sometimes elegiac, sometimes celebratory. Several pieces dramatize spiritual questioning and the cost of social servitude, while others reflect on beauty, art, and the paradoxes of pride and poverty. The result is a compact sequence blending technical restraint with vivid metaphor and moral concern.

Never the Final Stone

Though by the glory of your lady’s face

The riots of the sun and moon are quelled,

Yet have the hands that fashioned her some grace

Whereto perfection was allied, withheld.

The perfect wooer never speaks the word

The object of his passion most would hear;

So does expectance keep her wild feet spurred

Toward that which ever is no more than near.

And daily from His lonely mountain-top,

God sees us rear our Babels on the plain;

Then with one stone to go, He lets us drop

That we may want and strive for Him again.