Poetry: Aquaphobia

"A black child is 5 times as likely to drown as a white child of the same age"
- U.S. Centers for Disease Control

When we crossed
the Pond on
our own eons
ago
it was treated as a
shame
suppressed even as it was
recorded
But when your forebears did the
same
you made them the subject
of glittering tributes
even as
they rounded up our best
youths
How many died
in stinking cargo holds
seasoned by the sea and the
shit of their own brethren
How many joined
the food chain of
the deep
filling the bellies of
great whites
a better fate perhaps
than serving the finless
two-legged
sharks above deck
How many were
tortured and hanged and
whipped
to shape the plantation capitalist
dream
and shaped - and groped and
raped -to fit
the wet dreams
of lascivious
weaklings
That which was once
our
strength
is now our weakness
for it is in ruling
the seas
that the white man
remade the world in
his self-centred materialistic
image
How many babies
used as
gator bait
were lost to
slaughter
and now you wonder
how so many
of us
fear
the water




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