to the white Lord

Lord when you visit my continent again
i want you to take a different route

not by sea or desert. those passageways
have been hemotransfused with pints

of my ancestral blood

1647, i still remember at the shores of Elmina
when the cheers of a free society

shriveled into a jargon.
a king; a negro master
a no man’s land; a colony.

i remember when infants were beaten
to perfect & articulate a foreign tongue

& black women bathed by strangers
for their captain's nighttime escapade.

& i also remember when we had to shame
our shrines and take the God whom our white Lord

feared though he only punished the sins
on a black sin

because if it were not so, he would have punished
them a long time ago for even plotting to incarcerate

our lands

but dear white Lord, if you want to be seen as all
good again, spare my land a little freedom

to think for itself after her independence.