This Black Body Pt. 3

"For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become.  It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved and unassailable and monumental dignity.  You come from a long line of poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer.  One of them said, The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off." -- James Baldwin, My Dungeon Shook


There are times when this body feels like a curse
Like a funeral shroud draped in shadow
Over bones bleached with the fear of being laid to rest too soon.
A doom inherited and passed down from generation to generation.
Gifted to us from a colonial dream.
As migrant ships cut black bodies off from the blood of their tribes.
No Yoruba, Kikuyu, or Ashanti to sustain them.
No Ogun, Mulungu, or Asase to shape their dreams with myth or origin.
Cut off from the source, love amputated from their veins
Chained by the weight of a history frozen in time
A static block sticking them in the back someone else's words
Sticking them so far in the back of someone else's history
Giving way to a tradition of men unable to love their sons
Taught not to love their sons
Lessons learned on trading ships and auction blocks
A cycle of diaspora passed down to a son by his father

Who inherited it from his father
Who inherited it from his father
Who inherited it from his father
Who inherited it from a colonist
Who inherited it from an auctioneer
Who inherited it from a ship captain
Who inherited it from a king

That constructed an economy
To mint my bones into currency
And weave my skin into a curse
This is how the black body is commodified
Itemized and systemized
To become a machine of labor
Designed to build a country and bear its history

But I am no machine
I am a black body that lives and breathes
Sparked by a flame that resides in my soul
To thaw myself out of this frozen history
And dispel the curse that has stuck me in time

Here I stand
With my two black hands
Raised up in personal rebellion
To swear an oath
To deconstruct my past
And shape my own future