After our fierce loving
in the brief time we found to be together,
you lay in the half light
exhausted, rich,
with your face turned sideways on the pillow
and I traced the exquisite
line of your profile, dark against the white,
delicate and lovely as a child’s.
Perhaps
you will cease to love me.
or we may be consumed in the holocaust,
but I keep, against the ice and the fire,
the memory of your profile on the pillow.
–Dudley Randall
Why are our ancestors
always kings and princes
and never the common people?
Was the Old Country a democracy
where every man was a king?
Or did the slave-catchers
steal only the aristocrats
and leave the fieldhands
laborers
street cleaners
garbage collectors
dish washers
cooks
and maids
behind?
My own ancestor
(research reveals)
was a swineherd
who tended the pigs
in the Royal Pigstye
and slept in the mud
among the hogs.
Yet I’m as proud of him
as of any king or prince
dreamed up in fantasies
of bygone glory.
–Dudley Randall
The Poetry Corner 