After Countee Cullen, "From the Dark Tower"

Today, like many days, I feel as if I am sowing, never reaping,
and wondering if I ever will. I think of late summer, the fruit
sweet and swollen and ripened on the vine and watch,
silent and outside as too many harvest fruit they did not plant.

There is a price we pay, a price we assign to our brothers,
we sell them for a price too cheap, we rob them of their labor.
And yet I know this will not last forever: this blindness is not eternal,
this distraction of song and story that tells the lie we want to hear.

It is not forever that we will give way, give in to these urges,
to the not altogether hidden manipulation of our desire.
One day, these tears and pain will end, and we will see
our fullness, sweet and swollen and ripened on the vine.

And tonight, when day gives way, and night offers some relief,
our eyes will fix on things more distant, on stars and things beyond ourselves.
We will find hidden the beginnings of these flowers, of fruit beyond this world:
more delicate, more perfect, like fruit before the fall.

And in this stillness we will put away the pain we feel
and wait with hope and patience, tending to these seeds.