Black skin is now specimen
for shooting practice
by white skins who think
it wise to destroy
the devil -in black-

We didn’t beg to be broken
into breaking news
scattered into lobes of
juicy stories on CNN, BBC
like propitiatory kolanuts

We only asked to exist
but the sweats slithering on
black faces on France 24
are anguish of subversive existence
young men running into noisy streets
hugging placards with words
that sound like incantations,
women, their tear-full soliloquies
mourning comrades whose mirth
are subdued in the bullets
of race, hate, and
many fatal things
that only white people know

We live each day
swaddled in the scares of
lurking bullets on the streets of America
screaming headlines on tabloids
we are; we all are
potential guinea-pigs for the
deathly experiment of
uniformed kill-joys
hunting for another Alton
to delete for his blackness:

We no longer weep
for our brothers mangled
by bullets steeped in racial gun-powder
from the shotguns of idiots
with skins as pale as an evening sun

We no longer weep
for comrades swallowed by the
fierce hatred of prejudicial mutilators
drunk on their scorching hatred
for the ‘dark continent’

We no longer weep
we only eschew each dusk
hoping that sooner than we know
‘black lives matter too’
will dance on the glossy chest of
white-owned newspapers
maybe then, just maybe then
colours will become nothing
other than pigments for visual art
and we shall cough out bottle-up tears
for our coffined black brothers…

(c) Copyright 2017 Adefolami Ademola

Adefolami Ademola is a poet, social commentator, and content writer. Born in Ajegunle, where poverty was the only song that escaped the throat of weary mothers and indifferent children, books were his companions. As such, writing gave him an outlet to express the things he needed to say.

His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Sentinel Literary Quarterly, Poetry potion, New Orleans Review, Prosopisia and other journals. He also writes op-eds for Ynaija, and publishes his responses to societal ills and faults on Akoma.

A 2016 PIN (Poets in Nigeria) Poets’ Residency Fellow, his poem, “Memories, Regurgitated” inevitably made the Top Ten Shortlist in the 2016 edition of the Korea/Nigeria Cultural Poetry Fiesta.
He is presently a Public Relations Executive at WNTCAPITAS Consulting, a new-age media and strategic communications brand.