Who knows when the earth was split into
Black and white
No record of any earthquake
Nor of any planetary catastrophe;
Is history lying buried in
unseen vaults under the seas
The ocean, Derek Walcott had said,
keeps turning blank pages
looking for history …
the one of lamentations
On diving into turbulent waves of the ocean
Peeks and darts of black history
hit and hurt
My daughter ashamed
Shoved into the vaults
Her blonde Barbie doll with bluest eyes
And in the real fictive world
The little baby killed brutally by mama
Comes back haunting in Beloved
Death saving her from return to slavery while
Not liberating her from filial ties
What’s not white is beauty wasted
It’s just colour said she
to people not listening
But she writes for the black who do
White smoke and muscle
Pulling the cultural engine
White becoming whiter
Black, blacker
Between the two, an abysmal chasm
Filling once again with lusty calls
for supremacy at one end and
On the other
black screams and yelps
In search of their Africa
All held in the warp of time
Stained history petrified and written
In invisible ink raising its hood
Again and yet again
