Allen Ginsberg — The Little Black Boy

My mother bore me in the southern wild And I am black, but O my soul is white! White as an angel is the English child But I am black, as if bereaved of light My mother taught me underneath a tree And, sitting down before the heat of day She took me on her lap and kissèd me And, pointing to the East, began to say: ‘Look on the rising sun: there God does live And gives His light, and gives His heat away And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive Comfort in morning, joy in the noonday ‘And we arе put on earth a little space That wе may learn to bear the beams of love; And these black bodies and this sunburnt face Are but a cloud, and like a shady grove ‘For, when our souls have learned the heat to bear The cloud will vanish, we shall hear His voice Saying, “Come out from the grove, my love and care And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice.”’ Thus did my mother say, and kissed me And thus I say to little English boy When I from black, and he from white cloud free And round the tent of God like lambs we joy I’ll shade him from the heat till he can bear To lean in joy upon our Father’s knee; And then I’ll stand and stroke his silver hair And be like him, and he will then love me