The Black Christ, & other poems

Chapter 45: There Must Be Words

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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.

There Must Be Words

This wound will be effaced as others have,

This scar recede into oblivion,

Leaving the skin immaculate and suave,

With none to guess the thing they gaze upon.

After a decent show of mourning I,

As once I ever was, shall be as free

To look on love with calm unfaltering eye,

And marvel that such fools as lovers be.

These are brave words from one who like a child

Cuts dazzling arabesques on summer ice

That, kissed by sun, begins to crack and thaw;

The old assurance dies, only the wild

Desire to live goes on; any device

Compels its frantic grasp, even a straw.