Lois Augusta Cuglar, "Consecration" (1927)
My proud, White flesh a Black girl’s pangs to ease,
My muscles wrenched a Red-skin’s wrongs to crush,
My entire body diced to clean the slate,
Sheer mock-heroics? They'll have love of me:
The long-enduring, mystical Chinese,
The colored girls whose goodness makes me blush,
The kind-faced squaws who peddle basketry.
They'll have it. Great God, surely it is right?
He taught it . . . Thy son pleasing in Thy sight—
No dawdling, half-way measures satisfy—
I must earn sure approval in Thine eye.
Failing, I plunge (may nothing me exempt)
In cauldron—seething, scalding self-contempt.
Published in Ebony and Topaz, 1927