Honorable Mention

WE ARE NOT BLACK

Our world is covered in darkness

Yet it is broad daylight.

No, it is not that eclipse of the sun

It is the eclipse of our dark mind.

It is the eclipse of our gloomy politics and economy,

The incandescence overshadowed by the bushel of civilized prejudice, complex and

greed.

We are not black because our skin is dark,

Someone must have thought us dark and called us black!

God nor Science calls us black

We are black because we were painted black.

We are black because the devil is black.

The mistake we made was to accept the epithet, and admit the connotation.

For God is not white because good is white,

White is superior to black so God has to be white.

White chalk is good on blackboard,

So is charcoal on whiteboard.

But the whiteboard is a product of modern invention

Hence, white is superior to black

Not by precedence but by preference.

 

he who invented the word, 'black'

did not create the dark world.

It is the myopia of our mind eye.

Adam and Eve enjoyed the bliss of naked ignorance.

The serpent and the fruit cured their innocent blindness

Who says white, pure and black, bad?

The rest is history.

 

White and black are colours,

Both colours have their use.

White can be bad and black can be good

It is all a matter of the use, colours are innocent.

But mixture of white and black is equal to...?

For if black is bad and if white is good,

If dark is evil and white is godly,

Shall we remove the colour black from among the colours of the world?

©2014 Laide Salako

About the Author Laide Salako

Laide Salako is a graduate of English from the University of Lagos, Nigeria, also certified to teach Cambridge IGCSE ESL. He has written a couple of published and unpublished, fiction and non-fiction poems, plays, articles and short stories. His poems have appeared in Foliate Oak Magazine, on Allpoetry and Poetryclub websites while some of his articles and other works are being considered for publishing. He is married with a child and currently the Head of Language Department in Queensland Academy, an international high school in Nigeria.