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The Black Christ, & other poems cover

The Black Christ, & other poems

Chapter 23: The Foolish Heart
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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.

The Foolish Heart

“Be still, heart, cease those measured strokes;
Lie quiet in your hollow bed;
This moving frame is but a hoax
To make you think you are not dead.”
Thus spake I to my body’s slave,
With beats still to be answerèd;
Poor foolish heart that needs a grave
To prove to it that it is dead.