Enchantment
Part I
Night
The moonlight:
Juice flowing from an over-ripe pomegranate
bursting
The cossack-crested palm trees:
motionless
The leopard spotted shade:
inciting fear
silence seeds sown. . .
Part II
Medicine Dance
A body smiling with black beauty
Leaping into the air
Around a grotesque hyena-faced monster:
The sorcerer—
A black body—dancing with beauty
Clothed in African moonlight,
Smiling more beauty into its body.
The hyena-faced monster yelps!
Echo!
Silence—
The dance
Leaps—
Twirls—
The twirling body comes to a fall
At the feet of the monster.
Yelps—
Wild—
Terror-filled—
Echo—
The hyena-faced monster jumps
starts,
runs,
chases his own yelps back to the wilderness.
The black body clothed in moonlight
Raises up its head,
Holding a face dancing with delight.
Terror reigns like a new crowned king.
This poem is in the public domain.
"Enchantment" appeared in The New Negro: An Interpretation (Albert & Charles Boni, Inc., 1925).
Lewis Grandison Alexander
Lewis Grandison Alexander was born in 1900 in Washington D. C.. An editor, actor, and playwright, his poems appeared in the magazines The Crisis, Opportunity, and Fire!!, as well as the anthologies The New Negro (Albert and Charles Boni, 1925), Caroling Dusk (Harper & Brothers, 1927), and Ebony and Topaz (1927). He died in 1945.