If for a day joy masters me,
Think not my wounds are healed;
Far deeper than the scars you see,
I keep the roots concealed.

They shall bear blossoms with the fall;
I have their word for this,
Who tend my roots with rains of gall,
And suns of prejudice.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on January 15, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Confession” appears in Countee Cullen’s collection Copper Sun (Harper & Brothers, 1927). In Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic (University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), Houston A. Baker Jr., distinguished professor of English at Vanderbilt University, writes, “The overriding dichotomy in [Cullen’s] second volume, Copper Sun, is one of stasis and change.” The short poem operates upon a “metaphor of germination,” which, according to Baker, pervades the entire first section of Copper Sun, titled “Color,” which deals with the theme of race. Although “tones of apocalypse,” reckoning, or retribution hang over the poem, its speaker may “see a better day approaching, the possibility of regeneration and immortality, and death as an occasion for solace and wisdom. [. . .] Though he is now battered and scarred, there is a new day coming for the Black American.”