SEDUCTION**
(for a friend who asked if I were "Caucasian". My answer: no one determines the nationality of their skin when born. But all of us can determine who we are and who we stand with and what our lives mean. I chose long ago to stand against oppression and to stand along side those fighting their oppression. Not as a white man, but as a human being)
You beat your ‘tana’ drum
with ancient, calloused hands
making it speak relentlessly,
as if you were rain soaked wind
announcing moonless death.
As it echoes down brown, barren rivers,
its crescendo can be heard
crashing through tangled undergrowth
until it reaches the
timeless and continuous sea.
~~~
The ocean has swallowed
millennia of hardships,
where, on this very spot,
blood flowed freely, soaking
these sands with slavery’s misery.
It was here
the Great Rock at Toubab Dialaw
was born.
Born and grew.
Grew from endless
emptiness, borne as the
beating of human flesh.
It was hacked, torn from limb
and shackled, then
dispersed to distant shores.
Blood, red with resistance,
soaked the sands,
colored the tides,
and choked the air with its
beat, beat, beat,
beatings and death.
Blood ran thick with sated flies
and when you looked into their eyes,
all you saw was bottomless ocean.
Empty
Yet pulling,
like seduction.
~~~
You beat your ‘tana’ drum
with hardened, calloused hands,
and your rage.
You make it speak seduction,
enticing us to dance on
Toubab Dialaw’s ****** shores,
staring into the bottomless eyes of death.
It is pulling
pulling,
pulling us
into its seduction.
Filling us with your anger,
with your rage;
filling us with your drumming tongue
and the unquenchable thirst for revolution;
for all these wrongs to be undone.
written as redzone 3.21.07
posted by Aztec Warrior
I wrote this poem several years ago and under the pen name 'redzone'. I looked for it last night in my notebook because of a conversation with a friend about the ugliness of slavery and continuing outrages against Black folks in today's america.