The Black Christ, & other poems

Chapter 38: At a Parting

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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.

At a Parting

Let us not turn for this aside to die,

Crying a lover may not be a friend.

Our grief is vast enough without that lie;

All stories may not boast a happy end.

Love was a flower, sweet, and flowers fade;

Love was a fairy tale; these have their close.

The endless chronicle was never made,

Nor, save in dreams, the ever-scented rose.

Seeing them dim in passion’s diadem,

Our rubies that were bright that now are dull,

Let them not fade without their requiem,

How they were red one time and beautiful,

And how the heart where once a ruby bled

May live, yet bear that mark till it is dead.