Eyes - Pablo Manzoni
Photography: Melvin Sokolsky
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 bereav'd 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 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 man 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 that heat to bear,
The cloud will vanish; we shall hear his voice,
Saying: 'Come out from the grove, my love & care,
And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice.'"
This 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 live 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.
The Little Black Boy
by William Blake
(1757-1827)
Photography: James Moore
Harper's Bazaar December 1964
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