Bright Bindings

Your love to me was like an unread book, 
Bright-backed, with smooth white pages yet unslit; 
Fondly as a lover, foolishly, I took 
It from its shelf one day and opened it. 
Here shall I read, I thought, beauty and grace, 
The soul’s most high and awful poetry;— 
Alas for lovers and the faith they place 
In love, alas for you, alas for me. 

I have but read a page or two at most, 
The most my horror-blinded eyes may read. 
I find here but a windy tapering ghost 
Where I sought flesh gifted to ache and bleed. 
Yet back you go, though counterfeit you be. 
I love bright books even when they fail me. 

Credit

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on February 15, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“Bright Bindings” was included as part of Countee Cullen’s poetry collection The Black Christ and Other Poems (Harper & Brothers, 1929). About the poem, David Goldweber, an English instructor at Merritt College, writes in his essay “Cullen, Keats, and the Privileged Liar,” published in Papers on Language and Literature, Vol. 38, Issue 1 (Winter 2002), “In ‘Bright Bindings,’ a lover places faith in a beloved, finds her inadequate, but comes away without bitterness or malice. She is like a book he may read.”