This cardboard prison they call an archive

is cold, airless and silent as death.

Floor to ceiling boxes contain voices

no longer heard yet still wailing within

and faces no longer seen yet still missing  in a

jail of captured snippets, images and memories

like the severed heads and bleached bones of

dismembered bodies neatly locked away in the vaults

of museums and universities of the world

in the name of science or history or anthropology or

something else so important at the time that

justified the collection of bits and pieces of another –

the Other.

Reams of records tell how you measured

our heads with every western yardstick –

examined us through your  voyeuristic lens,

scrutinised our children’s fingernails under

microscopes and found them remarkably pale –

looked inside women’s vaginas where

that rosebud is pink as pink is pink

despite the otherwise apparent differences

between black and white such as

intellect, industry and capacity to settle.

We are the inmates incarcerated within these

cardboard cells where every neatly dotted ‘i’,

and symmetrically crossed ‘t’ screams out:

Read this Black angst against

these white pages.