  We investigate masses of light mesons from a coupled system of
Dyson--Schwinger (DSE) and Bethe--Salpeter equations (BSE), taking into account
dominant non-Abelian, sub-leading Abelian, and dominant pion cloud
contributions to the dressed quark-gluon vertex. The axial-vector
Ward-Takahashi identity preserving Bethe-Salpeter kernel is constructed and the
spectrum of light mesons calculated. Our model goes significantly beyond the
rainbow-ladder. We find that sub-leading Abelian corrections are further
dynamically suppressed, and that our results supersede early qualitative
predictions from simple truncation schemes.
