my morning poem,
or 2 today related,,,

1

little black boy,

My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but oh 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 kissed me,
And, pointed 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 are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love
And these black bodies and this sunburnt face
Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.

'For when our souls have learn'd 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.

William Blake

2

on reading william blakes little black boy,

Two centuries or even more gone by
Since William Blake wrote 'The little black boy'
He told in verse how black skin equalled white
And in what he wrote of course the poet was right.

He wrote the famous verses at a time
When to be black was looked on as a crime
A lesson in human love perhaps one day
That others might learn from what he had to say.

His verses put him in a higher place
When he wrote of the equality of race
And in history the great poet made his mark
When he preached that white was no greater than dark.

But even in the twenty first century
Some with the Poet's views still do not agree
Some still say black is not as good as white
But of course these people live in darker light.

A lesson here for all humanity
From bard who lived in eighteenth century
That racial discrimination is unwise
As all different races equal in God's eyes.

Francis Duggan