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The Black Christ, & other poems cover

The Black Christ, & other poems

Chapter 18: Light Lady
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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.

Light Lady

They say when virtue slipped from her,
Awakened by her fall,
Sin seemed to work a miracle
And made her soul grow tall.
Here with her penny papers by,
We see how well she diced:
Nothing to do but munch her gums
And sing the love of Christ.
And now with alms for what she was
Men stroke her ragged fur;
When Death comes down this street, his face
Will not be strange to her.