The Black Christ, & other poems

Chapter 43: Song in Spite of Myself

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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.

Song in Spite of Myself

Never love with all your heart,

It only ends in aching;

And bit by bit to the smallest part

That organ will be breaking.

Never love with all your mind,

It only ends in fretting;

In musing on sweet joys behind,

Too poignant for forgetting.

Never love with all your soul,

For such there is no ending,

Though a mind that frets may find control,

And a shattered heart find mending.

Give but a grain of the heart’s rich seed,

Confine some under cover,

And when love goes, bid him God-speed,

And find another lover.