Inspired by a recent poem by Emmanuel Phakathi titled "Who knows it feels it."
Your brush touches paint the same
Spread simple over varied canvas
Meant to make art for eyes
That ache for scenes of beauty
And such beauty is abound
In every nuanced color of our lives
We paints do not get to choose our color
Lead stepped in manure to produce white paint
never got to choose its fate
Nor did the dyes trapped in cochineal insect
destined to be crimson
Weep for all the ground-up bones
Used to enhance beautiful ebony tones
Or the powdered precious stones
Called ultramarine, translated "beyond the sea"
We paints don't get to choose our medium
Like wooden tapestries of African Artists
Rich and earthy, beyond beauty
Or painstakingly bound hempen thread
A dedication of Italian artwork
Or the unknown fresco origin
Which gave painters joy on the Isle of Crete
To the modern U.S. canvas
Made of cotton, PVC, and ingenuity
We do not choose our color
Red, white, black, green, yellow, blue
We do not choose our canvas
From developed nation to those without
We do not choose our origin
We do not choose our ethnicity
We can only choose our actions
I choose to believe
That we are all beautiful paints
Not meant to separate
But rather to blend together
In truest of beautiful form
And spread vivid hues of color
Across this tapestry of Earth
Emmanuel, your poem really touched me. I have been working on my graduate's degree in Neuroscience and have been delving deeper and deeper into art and history and culture. It is hard to believe some of the tragedies that we as human beings have engineered against ourselves on the basis of difference when there are so many examples of how collaboration is the only way to truly achieve beauty. Art is very much one of those medians. If any of you think you are better than anyone else based on how you were born, you just became less than them. I I truly weep for your untrue perception.
