WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
The Black Christ, & other poems cover

The Black Christ, & other poems

Chapter 37: Therefore, Adieu
Open in WeRead

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.

Therefore, Adieu

Now you are gone, and with your unreturning goes
All I had thought in spite of you would stay;
Now draws forever to its unawakening close
The beauty of the bright bandanna’d day.
Now sift in ombrous flakes and revolutions slow
My dreams descending from my heady sky.
The balm I kept to cool my grief in (leaves of snow)
Now melts, with your departure flowing by.
I knew, indeed, the straight unswerving track the sun
Took to your face (as other ecstasies)
Yet I had thought some faith to me in them; they run
From me to you as fly to honey, bees.
Avid, to leave me neither fevered joy nor ache,
Only of soul and body vast unrest.
Sun, moon, and stars should be enough; why must you take
The feeling of the heart out of the breast?
Now I who dreamed before I died to shoot one shaft
Of courage from a warped and crooked bow,
Stand utterly forsaken, stripped of that small craft
I had, watching with you all prowess go.