[Stylist] a poem

[Ann Chiappetta]

Confession

 

 

Countee Cullen 

 

 

If for a day joy masters me,

Think not my wounds are healed; 

Far deeper than the scars you see,

I keep the roots concealed. 

They shall bear blossoms with the fall;

I have their word for this, 

Who tend my roots with rains of gall,

And suns of prejudice.

 

 

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on January 15,
2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

 

 

 

Countee Cullen

1903-1946

Countee Cullen was born Countee LeRoy Porter on May 30, 1903, likely in
Louisville, Kentucky. He attended De Witt Clinton High School in New York
City and began writing poetry at the age of fourteen. When he was fifteen,
he was unofficially adopted by F. A. Cullen, the minister of a Methodist
church in Harlem.

 

Cullen entered New York University after high school. Around the same time,
his poems were published in The Crisis, under the leadership of W. E. B. Du
Bois, and Opportunity, a magazine published by the National Urban League.
Cullen was soon after published in Harper's, the Century Magazine, and
Poetry. He won several awards for his poem, "Ballad of the Brown Girl," and
graduated from New York University in 1925. That same year, he published his
first volume of verse, Color (Harper & Bros., 1925), and was admitted to
Harvard University, where he completed an MA in English.

 

Cullen went on to publish several more poetry collections, including On
These I Stand: An Anthology of the Best Poems of Countee Cullen (Harper &
Bros., 1947); The Black Christ and Other Poems (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1929);
Copper Sun (Harper & Bros., 1927), and the seminal anthology Caroling Dusk:
An Anthology of Verse by Black Poets of the Twenties (Harper & Brothers,
1927). An imaginative lyric poet, Cullen wrote in the

 

Ann M. Chiappetta, M.S.

Making Meaningful ConnectionsThrough Media 

914.393.6605 USA

Anniecms64 at gmail.com <mailto:Anniecms64 at gmail.com> 

All things Annie: www.annchiappetta.com <http://www.annchiappetta.com>  

 

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