  We investigate masses and decay constants of light mesons from a coupled
system of Dyson--Schwinger and Bethe--Salpeter equations. We explicitly take
into account dominant non-Abelian contributions to the dressed quark-gluon
vertex stemming from the gluon self-interaction. We construct the corresponding
Bethe-Salpeter kernel that satisfies the axial-vector Ward-Takahashi identity.
Our numerical treatment fully includes all momentum dependencies with all
equations solved completely in the complex plane. This approach goes well
beyond the rainbow-ladder approximation and permits us to investigate the
influence of the gluon self-interaction on the properties of mesons. As a first
result we find indications of a nonperturbative cancellation of the gluon
self-interaction contributions and pion cloud effects in the mass of the
rho-meson.
