LIGHTNING IN YOUR EYES

Then you’re doing your thing, maybe fetching water from a clear stream, the fish swimming around your ankles; maybe pounding yams in a mortar and stirring a thick soup in a pot over an open fire; maybe listening to a handsome young man tell you of his love, convincing you with a display of strength and gentleness.

Then all of it disappears, like smoke from a dying fire.

You wouldn’t even treat your animals the way that you are treated, treated like less than shit by these men with pasty skin and strange colored eyes and hair, men who seem to speak through their nose. They confuse you with their demands, with their questions, their methods, their ideas, their religion, their culture; they ask for everything, wanting to empty you of all that is earthy and rich and good and black.

Second, you have babies.

Maybe with a man with earth in his skin, or bastard children with the man that owns you. Children that you may never see again.

Tis your punishment, you see,

for refusing to cower,

for having skin that glistens in the sun,

for having hair that has a mind of its own, for having a backbone of steel – it refuses to bend.

But yet, you do not see.

And so you subscribe to ideals that irritate your skin till it is protesting, you bend and bend over backwards, your spine a pliable, malleable rubber. You forget yourself, your voice dying in the pollution.

Third, you die.

In your dying you come alive, opening up bodies and restoring bodies.

You weave wispy threads together, bearing the ones that were, are and will be, in your body.

You shatter glass, say NO to no, die on the altar bearing the words “I CAN”.

Happily, you die.

Unashamed, unrepentant, standing up to see a black horizon,

Yet, golden is the Sun.

And you press.

Because you see.

Now you see.

The End.