Color

COLOR

By
Countee Cullen

Harper & Brothers, Publishers
New York and London
mcmxxv

COLOR

Copyright, 1925, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America

To my Mother and Father
This First Book

Acknowledgments

For permission to reprint certain of these poems thanks is hereby given to the following publications:

The American Mercury
The Bookman
The Century
The Crisis
The Conning Tower: New York World
Folio
Harper’s Magazine
Les Continents
The Messenger
The Nation
Opportunity
Palms
Poetry: A Magazine of Verse
The Southwestern Christian Advocate
The Survey Graphic
The World Tomorrow
Vanity Fair

Contents

To You Who Read My Book

SOON every sprinter,

However fleet,

Comes to a winter

Of sure defeat:

Though he may race

Like the hunted doe,

Time has a pace

To lay him low.

Soon we who sing,

However high,

Must face the Thing

We cannot fly.

Yea, though we fling

Our notes to the sun,

Time will outsing

Us every one.

All things must change

As the wind is blown;

Time will estrange

The flesh from the bone.

The dream shall elude

The dreamer’s clasp,

And only its hood

Shall comfort his grasp.

A little while,

Too brief at most,

And even my smile

Will be a ghost.

A little space,

A Finger’s crook,

And who shall trace

The path I took?

Who shall declare

My whereabouts;

Say if in the air

My being shouts

Along light ways,

Or if in the sea,

Or deep earth stays

The germ of me?

Ah, none knows, none,

Save (but too well)

The Cryptic One

Who will not tell.

This is my hour

To wax and climb,

Flaunt a red flower

In the face of time.

And only an hour

Time gives, then snap

Goes the flower,

And dried is the sap.

Juice of the first

Grapes of my vine,

I proffer your thirst

My own heart’s wine.

Here of my growing

A red rose sways,

Seed of my sowing,

And work of my days.

(I run, but time’s

Abreast with me;

I sing, but he climbs

With my highest C.)

Drink while my blood

Colors the wine,

Reach while the bud

Is still on the vine....

Then ...

When the hawks of death

Tear at my throat

Till song and breath

Ebb note by note,

Turn to this book

Of the mellow word

For a singing look

At the stricken bird.

Say, “This is the way

He chirped and sung,

In the sweet heyday

When his heart was young.

Though his throat is bare,

By death defiled,

Song labored there

And bore a child.”

When the dreadful Ax

Rives me apart,

When the sharp wedge cracks

My arid heart,

Turn to this book

Of the singing me

For a springtime look

At the wintry tree.

Say, “Thus it was weighed

With flower and fruit,

Ere the Ax was laid

Unto its root.

Though the blows fall free

On a gnarled trunk now,

Once he was a tree

With a blossomy bough.”

Color

Yet Do I Marvel

I DOUBT not God is good, well-meaning, kind,

And did He stoop to quibble could tell why

The little buried mole continues blind,

Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,

Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus

Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare

If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus

To struggle up a never-ending stair.

Inscrutable His ways are, and immune

To catechism by a mind too strewn

With petty cares to slightly understand

What awful brain compels His awful hand.

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:

To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

A Song of Praise

(For one who praised his lady’s being fair.)

YOU have not heard my love’s dark throat,

Slow-fluting like a reed,

Release the perfect golden note

She caged there for my need.

Her walk is like the replica

Of some barbaric dance

Wherein the soul of Africa

Is winged with arrogance.

And yet so light she steps across

The ways her sure feet pass,

She does not dent the smoothest moss

Or bend the thinnest grass.

My love is dark as yours is fair,

Yet lovelier I hold her

Than listless maids with pallid hair,

And blood that’s thin and colder.

You-proud-and-to-be-pitied one,

Gaze on her and despair;

Then seal your lips until the sun

Discovers one as fair.

Brown Boy to Brown Girl

(Remembrance on a hill) (For Yolande)

“AS surely as I hold your hand in mine,

As surely as your crinkled hair belies

The enamoured sun pretending that he dies

While still he loiters in its glossy shine,

As surely as I break the slender line

That spider linked us with, in no least wise

Am I uncertain that these alien skies

Do not our whole life measure and confine.

No less, once in a land of scarlet suns

And brooding winds, before the hurricane

Bore down upon us, long before this pain,

We found a place where quiet water runs;

I held your hand this way upon a hill,

And felt my heart forebear, my pulse grow still.”

A Brown Girl Dead

WITH two white roses on her breasts,

White candles at head and feet,

Dark Madonna of the grave she rests;

Lord Death has found her sweet.

Her mother pawned her wedding ring

To lay her out in white;

She’d be so proud she’d dance and sing

To see herself tonight.

To a Brown Girl

(For Roberta)

WHAT if his glance is bold and free,

His mouth the lash of whips?

So should the eyes of lovers be,

And so a lover’s lips.

What if no puritanic strain

Confines him to the nice?

He will not pass this way again,

Nor hunger for you twice.

Since in the end consort together

Magdalen and Mary,

Youth is the time for careless weather:

Later, lass, be wary.

To a Brown Boy

THAT brown girl’s swagger gives a twitch

To beauty like a queen;

Lad, never dam your body’s itch

When loveliness is seen.

For there is ample room for bliss

In pride in clean, brown limbs,

And lips know better how to kiss

Than how to raise white hymns.

And when your body’s death gives birth

To soil for spring to crown,

Men will not ask if that rare earth

Was white flesh once, or brown.

Black Magdalens

THESE have no Christ to spit and stoop

To write upon the sand,

Inviting him that has not sinned

To raise the first rude hand.

And if he came they could not buy

Rich ointment for his feet,

The body’s sale scarce yields enough

To let the body eat.

The chaste clean ladies pass them by

And draw their skirts aside,

But Magdalens have a ready laugh;

They wrap their wounds in pride.

They fare full ill since Christ forsook

The cross to mount a throne,

And Virtue still is stooping down

To cast the first hard stone.

Atlantic City Waiter

WITH subtle poise he grips his tray

Of delicate things to eat;

Choice viands to their mouths half way,

The ladies watch his feet

Go carving dexterous avenues

Through sly intricacies;

Ten thousand years on jungle clues

Alone shaped feet like these.

For him to be humble who is proud

Needs colder artifice;

Though half his pride is disavowed,

In vain the sacrifice.

Sheer through his acquiescent mask

Of bland gentility,

The jungle flames like a copper cask

Set where the sun strikes free.

Near White

AMBIGUOUS of race they stand,

By one disowned, scorned of another,

Not knowing where to stretch a hand,

And cry, “My sister” or “My brother.”

Tableau

For Donald Duff

LOCKED arm in arm they cross the way,

The black boy and the white,

The golden splendor of the day,

The sable pride of night.

From lowered blinds the dark folk stare,

And here the fair folk talk,

Indignant that these two should dare

In unison to walk.

Oblivious to look and word

They pass, and see no wonder

That lightning brilliant as a sword

Should blaze the path of thunder.

Harlem Wine

THIS is not water running here,

These thick rebellious streams

That hurtle flesh and bone past fear

Down alleyways of dreams.

This is a wine that must flow on

Not caring how nor where,

So it has ways to flow upon

Where song is in the air.

So it can woo an artful flute

With loose, elastic lips,

Its measurement of joy compute

With blithe, ecstatic hips.

Simon the Cyrenian Speaks

HE never spoke a word to me,

And yet He called my name;

He never gave a sign to me,

And yet I knew and came.

At first I said, “I will not bear

His cross upon my back;

He only seeks to place it there

Because my skin is black.”

But He was dying for a dream,

And He was very meek,

And in His eyes there shone a gleam

Men journey far to seek.

It was Himself my pity bought;

I did for Christ alone

What all of Rome could not have wrought

With bruise of lash or stone.

Incident

(For Eric Walrond)

ONCE riding in old Baltimore,

Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,

I saw a Baltimorean

Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,

And he was no whit bigger,