To be black and asked to write
colorless verses,
is to bid the sable poet
to sing strange songs in a strange land;
to sing strange verses in a land
where eyes are said to be windows of the soul;
and minds, the seat of inner perspective.
From the cradle of ebony wombs come I and I;
flesh hued like coal---writing stinging words
from the sable perspective that is I:
Before Jah and the spirits of the ancestors,
it is not of I, to write a lie.