The Black Christ, & other poems

Chapter 31: A Song No Gentleman Would Sing to Any 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.

A Song No Gentleman
Would Sing to Any Lady

There were some things I might not know

Had you not pedagogued me so;

And these I thank you for;

Now never shall a piquant face

Cause my tutored heart a trace

Of anguish any more.

Before your pleasure made me wise

A simulacrum of disguise

Masked the serpent and the dove;

That I discern now hiss from coo,

My heart’s full gratitude to you,

Lady I had learned to love.

Before I knew love well I sang

Many a polished pain and pang

With proper bardic zeal;

But now I know hearts do not break

So easily, and though a snake

Has made them, wounds may heal.