WE'RE WALKING ON MARS AND YET DOWN HERE

WE’RE WALKING ON MARS AND YET DOWN HERE

We’re walking on Mars and yet down here

we’re still treating each other as aliens

we hate. Retrograde biases looping our heads

in a noose. Strange fruit. Did a Boy Scout teach you to do that?

What colour do you think an albino

would paint his skin if he had a palette of melanin?

White paper, black conte, every portrait

starts with an outline, but the face of a human

shines like character from the inside out.

Even the stars move through their lives

from violet to red like the order of the turning

of maple leaves in autumn, or a rainbow.

Eighteen million people kidnapped, enslaved,

worked to death and murdered as if murder were a sport

just to boost production and profits in cotton

to keep up to the invention of the cotton ginn

and wrap the skin of London in whole cloth,

much like Bangladesh even as we speak,

and when that dynastic link eventually broke,

and Reconstruction undid the liberation

six hundred thousand people had died for,

the poor killing the poor for the rights of the rich,

and the economic foodchains that were placed

on the scars of the backs that bore them

tasted just the same as the snakepit of whips

they’d recently thrown off, as the night closes in

on that little white ice-floe in the midst

of the global warning you ignore, you’re still

trying to convince your festering self

you’re a waterlily when, in fact, you’re a corpse flower

with a moral life of pus and a gangrenous spirit.

Let’s say like it is. You hate black people

because your victims learned more from you

than you did from them, and that ain’t creationism,

brother, that’s the straight up skinny on evolution.

PATRICK WHITE