Creating A Negro
On the bank of the James River,
Virginia Colony,
a proposal was conceived to constrain the African fire.
The ploy, a real achievement in the West-Indian settlements.
In Rome, bodies were paraded along the byways,
to make a statement.
My Massa used ropes.
We dangled by our necks like roosters in a slaughter house.
When the pining for liberty was stirred up in the marrows of our bones,
we set ablaze a few bungalows,
and murder some dumb beasts.
The statement we made was called an uprising.
The fields were abandoned, the livestock ran wild,
and the slothful young mistress had to breast-feed her own child.
The scheme had the ingredients of breaking a mule,
and Virginia Colony was the first lab for creating fools.
A prophet’s blessing was given to the merchants,
and black diamonds were shipped;
they were purged of the soil of the mother land.
A new being was fashioned, dependent on Massa.
A man was set against his consort and his seeds,
and the whips wrote rules on our backs in their faces;
our pride drained from the gorges in our hides,
and respect slowly seeped from their eyes.
The bond was broken;
a negro was concocted
without the spirit of Ghana, the Warrior King,
and the Ashanti, the pre-colonial backbone.
Should we not push,
as a woman in nativity,
for the renaissance?
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Submitted on May 01, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:08 min read
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Quick analysis:
Scheme | ABACDEFGHIJKLLMNCOPQRSTUVWKXYBZ |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,265 |
Words | 227 |
Stanzas | 1 |
Stanza Lengths | 31 |
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"Creating A Negro" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 9 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/68670/creating-a-negro>.
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