Cloth
for my dark sisters and brothers
I look into your eyes each and every time you gaze into the glass. Fixated eyes, focused firmly on a future clouded like dirty water. Your most prominent feature is that which sits steadily upon you, dormant. A lion in brush. Lyin’ in wait. Concealin’ your blue veins, unlike the white man, whose transparency reveals a skeleton with no spine. You and I are one people. You and I bleed the same hemoglobin as the men and women who were cut open and cut off from the home they once knew. The sacred crimson. Sacrificial sacrifices shed sickles; hell, I feel ‘em prick me from under my skin, in my heart valves. But you and I, we bleed the same.
I look into your eyes each and every time you fall into their seas of brown or hazel. Lookin’ into their souls as you stand on tippy-toes, their windows only close at dusk. Most of us are a mere husk; now I know you see ’em lookin’ all deranged, lost in a land where black remains just as strange. Noble melanin, packed with the Sonlight. The white man want what they can’t have. That explains the black man’s plight.
I look into your eyes each and every time you feel Nature’s mother tuggin’, pullin’ at the recesses of your mind. Naturally, the natural world is your muse, you use your bare feet to walk instead of your shoes. Connect to her better cuz you have nothin’ to lose. She gives us all that she has, awakened from slumber with water — doused, drenched in hopes and dreams of generations that yearn to reap what they’ve sown. This barren land is the white man’s. The luscious Motherland is our own.
