- Vol. 08
- Chapter 02
Justitia
I am Justitia, blindfolded lady Justice,
a moral force in this world of oppression.
I come to redress the wrongs of centuries,
armed with a sword, its blade swift and final
and a balance to weigh the evidence
that continues to accrue against you
even as you protest constant and loud.
You looted my people from their homeland,
stowed fetal in fecal ship holds across oceans,
sold and bartered, considered fractional humans.
Blithely you unraveled and rent families,
with whips and chains and threats,
growing rich off their sweaty toil,
planting your seed in their wombs.
You pillaged my continent,
your elaborate mask cast to the winds,
greedy for wealth, you divided the spoils
feasting on us like ravenous hyenas
ravaging, raping, ransacking, reneging,
torturing, killing, mocking, and monetizing,
flaunting eugenic superiority as justification.
Justitia
You print your lies to make them true,
Your fragility wounded, racial purity sullied.
Like black newsprint on pristine white paper,
you smear our reputations like ink,
then wash your hands of our plight,
apologies and reparations stuck in your craw,
even though it is you that needs redemption.
Physicists say that black is the absorption of all colour,
and white includes the entire spectrum of visible light.
Yet you persist in calling me a “person of colour”
oblivious to your hypocrisy and its irony.
Did you notice that my image would be the same
whether shot in black and white or colour?
I am honest, even in two-dimensions.
Tell me then, why you blindfold me and close my ears?
Does my stoic serenity bother you?
Does your conscience keep you awake at night?
Am I to be grateful to breathe through flared nostrils
and to speak without you gagging my sculpted lips?
No matter, in the final accounting
my decency will outweigh your avarice.