In honor of Black History Month here are four quatrains from Countee Cullen’s poem,
“Song in Spite of Myself,” from his 1929 book, “The Black Christ and Other Poems.”
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 musings 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 finds mending.
Give but a grain of the heart’s rich seed,
Confine some undercover,
And when love goes, bid him God speed,
And find another lover.
And from MY SOUL’S HIGH SONG, THE COLLECTED WRITINGS
OF COUNTEE CULLEN, Voice of the Harlem Renaissance — an excerpt
from Life To Love, by Countee Cullen, 1925:
While nameless birds from grove and blossom bend
Deluged my soul with song; if it were meet
To love Life so, then love will but complete
My Joy, for Life with Love can never end.
TO TODU TAOTAO TINIAN WITH LOVE
Losing short-term memory my long-term memory still roams
at 76 years old still enjoying writing sonnets and love poems
Down dusty coral roads I walk with rubber zoris on my feet
Flame tree flowers fall and gardenia flowers smell so sweet
With bad knees (baba tommo) and more arthritic joints I bend
Birds sing in the boonies, butterflies flutter, putitainobiu send
Messages to sweethearts whenever we chance to meet
A love for life, a love somewhat somehow incomplete
Where platonic loving and longing will seldom ever end
Tinian island is among the most beautiful I’ve ever seen
From East to West coast with Marpo Valley in between.
Joey “Pepe Batbon” Connolly is a retired educator who taught in the CNMI, NOLA, and LVNV. He is the Poet Laureate of Tinian and enjoys stargazing.
