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The Black Christ, & other poems cover

The Black Christ, & other poems

Chapter 5: That Bright Chimeric Beast

By Countee Cullen

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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.

That Bright Chimeric Beast

(For Lynn Riggs)

That bright chimeric beast

Conceived yet never born,

Save in the poet’s breast,

The white-flanked unicorn,

Never may be shaken

From his solitude;

Never may be taken

In any earthly wood.

That bird forever feathered,

Of its new self the sire,

After aeons weathered,

Reincarnate by fire,

Falcon may not nor eagle

Swerve from his eerie,

Nor any crumb inveigle

Down to an earthly tree.

That fish of the dread regime

Invented to become

The fable and the dream

Of the Lord’s aquarium,

Leviathan, the jointed

Harpoon was never wrought

By which the Lord’s anointed

Will suffer to be caught.

Bird of the deathless breast,

Fish of the frantic fin,

That bright chimeric beast

Flashing the argent skin,—

If beasts like these you’d harry,

Plumb then the poet’s dream;

Make it your aviary,

Make it your wood and stream.

There only shall the swish

Be heard, of the regal fish;

There like a golden knife

Dart the feet of the unicorn,

And there, death brought to life,

The dead bird be reborn.