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

The Black Christ, & other poems

Chapter 41: Bright Bindings
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.

Bright Bindings

Your love to me was like an unread book,
Bright-backed, with smooth white pages yet unslit;
Fondly as a lover, foolishly, I took
It from its shelf one day and opened it.
Here shall I read, I thought, beauty and grace,
The soul’s most high and awful poetry:—
Alas for lovers and the faith they place
In love, alas for you, alas for me.
I have but read a page or two at most,
The most my horror-blinded eyes may read.
I find here but a windy tapering ghost
Where I sought flesh gifted to ache and bleed.
Yet back you go, though counterfeit you be.
I love bright books even when they fail me.