Countee Cullen (1903-1946) was the adopted son of the Rev. Frederick Asbury Cullen, a leading minister in Harlem.  Cullen edited his high school newspaper and published his first poetry at the age of fifteen. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa at New York University and later earned an M.A. from Harvard University.  Cullen published a number of books of poetry and a novel, as well as serving as an editor of Opportunity magazine. Countee Cullen is remembered as a genteel poet, one who took as his models the English Romantics. 

Yet Do I Marvel

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why the flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind, too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

Incident

(For Eric Walrond)
Once riding in old Baltimore
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.
Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, “N*****.”
I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember.

Source: Lewis, David Levering.  The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader.  NY: Penguin Books, 1994.