The Skin on me

The skin on me has nothing to do with you, it is not yours to play with or redesign.

The skin on me has never been black, a medley of browns, blues and dark chocolate.

With each layer against the blistering rays, like a pigment of life steeped in the sand.

But the eyes roamed through me and saw – evil, dirty a far cry from immaculate.

 

Dirt was the basis for the cuts and plunder, homage to the battle of good and evil

You charged through the dark forests, the deep earth, wielding the sword and the word.

You made yourself our white god, quick to show your displeasure and to punish.

We bowed for the safety of our bodies, the flesh, the blood and the skin you knew.

 

In your magnanimity, you told me I spoke funny, and became the benevolent teacher.

I twisted my lips, unnatural but necessary, I smoothened my hair in terror of my mane.

Made short by belts weaving the air and cane ropes against the taut, hard pecker.

I must be a good learner for I have become so much like you unable to live in sin.

 

Who am I to speak? I am no child of slavery, of the gruelling journey through ten thousand seas.

Brown skin lost in unforeseen lands, no home or name, just deep welts patched into your cotton and plantations.

I am something else, tied to the modern. A different kind of servitude without chains of steel

I am you. An agent, a conflagration and a believer in the rightness of all you do.

 

I wanted to blame you but I couldn’t in all do so. You too were a victim, a pawn in an uneven game.

In choosing sides, you laid waste to the truths hidden in the past, to the blood awash on the walls of history.

The sooty reigns of the Egyptians, the Persians, the Babylonians, the Romans, the Greeks, the Turks, the English

and those who too must pass through the unforgiving halls of life.

 

Today, as the sun rises from the cover of the deep, and the skin on me catches the flagrant rays,

a question comes to me: “are you innocent? have you not enjoyed the privilege with the pain?”

Heavy words for my muddled mind resplendent in an unmaimed face.

Forced piety, short memory, had been the enemy all along, the ones against the skin on me.