I.
What is the point of dissecting an open wound?
I mean, the thing is already weeping.
Do you think coagulation cares who the culprit is
so long as the clot can form?
What to do when the clot cannot form—
Peel back the gauze and ask yourself why:
By 5 I understood segregation before I could spell it.
More a feeling crept up the black of my spine
than an abolished amendment.
“Nigger” under the breath by a boy who did not
understand the meaning of my second name.
The undressed wound pleading:
“No, but you’ve shaded my stars into night
Can’t you see Ufuoma means ‘peace of God’?”
A teen-aged blade to flesh the way his white friends
eyed-balled my skin
and then his skin
and then my skin.
“Yuck!” being the preliminary verdict before
being afforded the opportunity to justify my
right to love him.
So by the time I reached 21,
I finally understood the shape of the purple bruising,
Could trace and retrace every bump and groove by
the ugly river it ran through my epithelium.
Were I to count the ways my fellow
Homo sapiens have tried to inject shame into
who I perceive myself to be,
to pry their greedy little fingers into my consciousness,
Perhaps they would outnumber the melanocytes themselves!
As if another human
could ever discern through physical means what
God Himself has crowned holy.
II.
While my undressed wound has your attention,
it would like to state for the record it
did not ask to be here
(is in fact being slaughtered alive by an antibody army
of its own making)
which is to say:
If there is a wound,
there will always be a healing
Oh if only we would let it.
About: I really believe there are some deep-seated and gangrenous wounds only God can relieve us from, one of them being racism.
postscript: On a slightly lighter note, our immunity systems are fascinating, aren’t they? Scarring by sheer feat of nature.
