This seasonal transition has been delightful, so in pleasant memory of a former teacher and mentor, Lance Jeffers, I release my creative energy into this transition of Nature, that I/You/Thou may share renewed life. I thought of how Old Testament his prophecy was. He was unashamed in testifying about the evil and the good in human beings. He had conviction and character. He was willing to predict that a male poet “will explore the unexplored continent of himself and his people, will seek out the hidden caves and springs of beauty and hell, will seek out the hell and the complexity within his bones and within the viscera of his people” (“The Death of the Defensive Posture,” 259). These thundering words come from his seminal essay in The Black Seventies (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1970), edited by Floyd B. Barbour. His referring us to land masses and body parts is indicative of his “scientific” posture with regard to discovering truths about humanity. References to geography and anatomy recur in his poems; they reinforce the sense of greatness or grandeur. His aesthetic is grounded in humanistic, pre-Black Arts assumptions about the human condition, but his poetics is grounded in relentless investigation of what the human condition is from the vantage of Blackness. His “humanistic” response to writing as a way of knowing was an effort to balance logic with sensual saturation. His writing is a fine example of how universally inseparable are art and ethos.