Hands

Hands smooth and soft

Unscathed by life’s worries

Only haunted by ghostly fairies

Untouched by roughness

The roughness of the Black skin

Black skin born in the fields

Bred on bread from the worst breed of bran

Those hands I have touched

Those hands I’ve been rubbing recently

Hands that have held guns

Guns whose bullets have gone through hearts

Hearts of my little brother and drunkard uncle

...Listen to this deafening silence

And I have learnt to ignore the paleness of these hands

For I now know there is no Black and White

Only brown and pink, brown hands entangled in pink

And pink became pink when they peeled off brown

For years brown was peeled off and trashed in cans

Each can awaiting brown hands to pikitup

The soft hands whose bearer I now walk with

Hands that now hold me like a gun

Abreast, cocked up and set to shoot

Set to shoot at whoever dares the past

For the hands of our time to the raceless race belong