“Notes from a Fragile Love”

My second poem of January unfolds as a narrative of emotional exposure: raw, unguarded, and aching. It speaks to the quiet devastation of loving deeply while remaining unloved. The speaker stands as a witness to a fragile relationship he labored to nurture and protect, only to lose both the beloved and the love he poured into her.

“Notes from a Fragile Love”

I let you go
because the tenderness I offered
was never returned.
The passion I carried
became too heavy to hold alone.

When I told you I missed you,
you turned away,
as if longing were a foreign language
you refused to learn.

When I reached out for comfort,
you said, “You’re a man; deal with it.”
In that moment, you taught me
that vulnerability had no shelter with you.
You wanted emotional connection in theory,
but when it was mine,
it became inconvenient.

You wanted to hold my hand in public:
not for love,
not for passion,
but to be seen,
to borrow visibility without commitment.
You wanted the appearance of us,
not the responsibility.

You rationed the words “I love you,”
as if they were scarce.
I gave them freely,
infinitely,
to seal your heart and mine.
You wanted us hidden when it mattered,
a secret folded into convenience.
I wanted love that could stand in the light.

I carried your words inside me like scripture;
you erased mine as if they never mattered.
I remembered your heartbreak line by line,
while you put on earbuds
to silence mine.

I treasured your moans during lovemaking,
the way your body spoke
trust
intimacy
desire
connection
yet in motion,
you called his name,
and I learned my presence
was never singular.

When I spoke of a future with you,
you said you weren’t ready.
When I imagined a child,
a son bearing both our names.

You laughed,
and my hope became a joke.

That is when I understood:
I was listening with my whole soul
to someone who had already tuned me out.

And that is why
I let you go.
Not because I stopped loving you,
but because I finally loved myself enough
to stop offering intimacy
where it could not rest.

Most of us do not know how to live. Untrained in the art of the good life, we move forward by learning how to endure the circumstances that shape and constrain us.

The co-edited books that I have written: Part 2

At an academic conference at the University of Texas at Dallas!

Year: 2010

In my presentation, I discussed the concept of Négritude in the poetry of Léopold Sedar Senghor.

Happy New Year, Friends🎆🎊🎈 !

“The Year” by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

What can be said in New Year rhymes,
That’s not been said a thousand times?

The new years come, the old years go,
We know we dream, we dream we know.

We rise up laughing with the light,
We lie down weeping with the night.

We hug the world until it stings,
We curse it then and sigh for wings.

We live, we love, we woo, we wed,
We wreathe our prides, we sheet our dead.

We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear,
And that’s the burden of a year.

From “A Poem for Every Winter Day”

I want to wish you a happy last Sunday of December and the final Sunday of 2025! May it be filled with reflection, gratitude, and hope for the year ahead.

I am not sure if these Parisian photos of mine go together with this post; oh well, I feel like posting them because Paris is one of my favorite places to visit—especially the Louvre museum—and that I didn’t take any international trips this year. Lol

Paris, je me souviens; Ayiti m sonje w😊 🇫🇷 🧳

I always enjoy getting a fresh haircut. I look twenty years younger now! 😆

The following paragraph are taken from my forthcoming biography of Jean Price-Mars (“For the Sake of Black People and the Common Good: A Biography of Jean Price-Mars”: Vanderbilt University Press, 2026). It engages Price-Mars’s personal faith and religious sensibilities.

“My biography of Jean Price-Mars also analyzes his personal faith and religious responsibilities—if any can be clearly identified. Rather than affirming a firm personal commitment or piety to a specific religious tradition or creed, it is more suggestive to speak of Price-Mars’s religious curiosity. Yet Price-Mars’s deep interest in religion perhaps reflects his psychological conflict to reconcile the Christian faith of his father and grandmother with what he himself described as the “ancestral faith” or the “popular religion” of the Haitian people. He may have experienced a crisis of faith in his formative years as a university student in Paris, where he was exposed to a wide array of intellectual traditions, competing epistemologies, and France’s increasingly assertive non-theistic humanism and radical secularism, along with the country’s “progressive turn-away” from its Christian heritage.

Price-Mars’s turn to “Black Africa” through Vodou was a strategic intellectual and cultural pathway, through which he sought connection, psychological relief, and resolution to a profound crisis of faith and identity. As an emerging Haitian intellectual in his early twenties, struggling to understand his ancestral roots or heritage, he experienced a multifaceted crisis that was at once religious, cultural, intellectual, historical, and psychological. In this sense, for Price-Mars, Haitian Vodou as a living religious system and symbol of ancestral memory functioned as a mediating force that helped bridge religious dissonance, cultural alienation, historical rupture, and psychological disruption. By adopting an anthropological approach to Vodou, Price-Mars mobilized the ancestral faith of the Haitian people as a central instrument in his nation-building and cultural nationalism project, seeking to unify Haiti’s diverse social groups whose lives, aspirations, and collective imagination had been fractured by the American military occupation and U.S. imperialism in Haiti. In this sense, Price-Mars may be understood as strategically employing Vodou as a religious system and anthropology as a scientific discipline in advancing a coherent political, cultural, and nation-building agenda.”

–Joseph, Celucien L., “For the Sake of Black People and the Common Good: A Biography of Jean Price-Mars” (Vanderbilt University Press, 2026), pp. 43-4.