Jungle Taste

There is a coarseness
In the songs of black men
Coarse as the songs
Of the sea,
There is a weird strangeness
In the songs of black men
Which sounds not strange
To me.

There is beauty
In the faces of black women,
Jungle beauty
And mystery
Dark hidden beauty
In the faces of black women,
Which only black men
See.

Credit

From Caroling Dusk (Harper & Brothers, 1927), edited by Countee Cullen. This poem is in the public domain.

Author

Edward S. Silvera

Edward S. Silvera was born in Florida in 1906 and relocated to Orange, New Jersey, later during his childhood. He graduated from Orange High School in 1924. By the time he published poetry in Countee Cullen’s Caroling Dusk (Harper & Brothers, 1927), he was in his junior year at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.

Date Published

01/01/1927