The Black Christ, & other poems

Chapter 47: Lesson

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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.

Lesson

I lay in silence at her side,

My heart’s and spirit’s choice;

For we had said harsh things and cried

On love in a bitter voice.

We lay and watched two points in space,

Pricked in heaven, faint and far.

They seemed so near, but who could trace

That width between star and star?

We lay and watched, and suddenly

There was a streak of light,

And where were two, the eye might see

But one star in the night.

My hand stole out, her hand crept near,

Grief was a splintered spar;

Two fused in one there, did you hear

Us claiming kinship, star?