Peacock Feather

Heav’n’s deepest blue,
Earth’s richest green,
Minted dust of stars,
Molten sunset sheen,
Are blent together
On this lithe brown feather,
In a disc of light—
Lithe, light!

Subscribe to the Poem-a-Day Podcast 

  

“Peacock Feather” originally appeared in the February 1922 issue of The Crisis.

Effie Lee Newsome was born on January 19, 1885, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is the author of Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors for Second Grade Readers (The Associated Publishers, 1940), and published numerous poems in The Crisis, Opportunity, and other leading journals of the Harlem Renaissance. She died in 1979. 

Black Lives Matter Anthology

“my skin shines blacker, lacquer”

—“Where Is She ::: Koté Li Yé” by R. Erica Doyle