colored queer waters

"
They require of us a song,
But where are our Gods?
Did we leave them on the shores
of Africa?

Could the name of Olorun,
the highest God,
be shouted across icy waters,
His omnipresence felt
as one gazed from the auction block
into the brutal masks of ailen faces?

Did one dare evoke Shango
to rain down his fiery wrath
on the tormentors of blackness,
reveling in their repulsive wrath
grown ripe and ready to be loosed
on a magnificent race of men

who
made stride across the continent of Africa
keeping steady gait thru the tangled jungles
who
with sanded eyes
treaded the vast Sahara and roamed the Kalahari
who
climbed Mt. Cameroon and Kilimanjaro
encircled by ancestral dieties
who
rowed with muscular rhythm
along the Zambezi and the Nile?

Would Ogun, God of Iron,
descend from heaven
on a spider’s web
and with his axe of iron
cut the tyrants loose
from his suffering people?

And Okun, with coral dress
and mudfish legs,
Would he disturb the sea
and recieve his lost leaping children
from the wretched vessels that brought them to Hell
from a land of the free?

Still lost
in an alien world
we raise our balck voices
across the bloody sea,
Spirits! Gods! or whatever
You be!

Aiwel,
Ala,
Amma,
Gu!

Kibuka,
Ngweo,
Nyame,
Mawu!

Musa,
Zin,
Mulungu,
Chuckwu!
Cover us…..!
Deliver us…!
UHURU!
"