A Mona Lisa
1
I should like to creep
Through the long brown grasses
That are your lashes;
I should like to poise
On the very brink
Of the leaf-brown pools
That are your shadowed eyes;
I should like to cleave
Without sound,
Their glimmering waters,
Their unrippled waters,
I should like to sink down
And down
And down . . . .
And deeply drown.
2
Would I be more than a bubble breaking?
Or an ever-widening circle
Ceasing at the marge?
Would my white bones
Be the only white bones
Wavering back and forth, back and forth
In their depths?
From Caroling Dusk (Harper & Brothers, 1927), edited by Countee Cullen. This poem is in the public domain.
Angelina Weld Grimké
Angelina Weld Grimké was born in Boston on February 27, 1880. She was the daughter of Archibald Grimké, who had been born a slave in Charleston, South Carolina, and Sarah Stanley Grimké, a white woman and the daughter of an abolitionist. Named after her great-aunt, the abolitionist and suffragist, Angelina Grimké Weld, Grimké grew up in liberal, aristocratic Boston society. She attended the best preparatory schools in Massachusetts, including Cushing Academy and the now defunct Carleton School.