Sweet veins of sugar run deep within our skin
Whipped and seared with striations of blood
And salt-filled wounds, an indelible record
Written on our backs
A dark ink that runs through time
Straight from our fore-parents’ pain
History is not a past tense but a well-remembered thing
Of toil and terror that bleeds into the present hours
And addresses our soul with stories of monied greed
That dripped from light, sugar-sweetened skins
Those that clamped the chains, those that cracked the whips
To brutish laughter and are risen yet again
To entrap with new stories of gluttony and greed
Wearing their thin disguise, wearing their blackened sheen
That drills down through layers and layers of time
To claim sweet veins of oil that rest unworried in the core beneath
And we who once were hurt and who once felt the pain
Have learned to profit from the loss
And to profit from the gain
And the massa-day avarice we once condemned and blamed
We see in the mirror now garbed in full length
And caught in full embrace of the very greed
Of the very sweetened deals
Now that we have signed our name
Here on this dotted line that pushes past the past
That pushes past the pain
To reveal the grins, the skin-teeth open mouths
Of the shiny, oil-slickened beings
That we have become
-Ryhaan Shah