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The calabash wherein she served my food,
Was smooth and polished as sandalwood:
Fish, as white as the foam of the sea,
Peppered, and golden fried for me.
She brought palm wine that carelessly slips
From the sleeping palm tree’s honeyed lips.
But who can guess, or even surmise
The countless things she served with her eyes?
From Caroling Dusk (Harper & Brothers, 1927), edited by Countee Cullen. This poem is in the public domain.
Brown Baby Cobina, with his large black velvet eyes,
His little coos of ecstasies, his gurgling of surprise,
With brass bells on his ankles, that laugh where’er he goes;
It’s so rare for bells to tinkle, above brown dimpled toes.
Brown Baby Cobina is so precious that we fear
Something might come and steal him, when we grownups are not near;
Out of the tense awed darkness, my Frangepani comes;
Whilst the blades of Heaven flash round her, and the roll of thunder drums
My young heart leaps and dances, with exquisite joy and pain,
As storms within and storms without I meet my love in the rain.
“The rain is in love with you darling; it’s kissing you everywhere,
Within a native hut, ere stirred the dawn,
Unto the Pure One was an Infant born
Wrapped in blue lappah that his mother dyed.
Laid on his father’s home-tanned deer-skin hide
The babe still slept by all things glorified.
Spirits of black bards burst their bonds and sang,
“Peace upon earth” until the heavens rang.