Deep Children

You strain me,
deep children of 2AM
with your holy clothes.
Well, holey clothes of course.
On the blood mud soil of this holy ground
you are gods among men.
The sinews of your legs,
under your charcoal sheets
push the plow of yesterday,
hard for life.

When I stood,
ugly in comparison,
white as a moonbeam
on your hallowed ground
I remembered,
that my love would ask me
from outside my safe place in his arms,
why you were black.

I will tell him that the
dark punishing sun of the
African sky,
threw some clay into the kiln,
and burnt your stately shapes.
It charred your skin dark
and you,
sitting dear in your brown toothed ignorance
subconsciously tell me through your eyes,
that I am the blood soil under your feet,
and your sweating, rotting ways
may always or sometimes
stand chuckling knowingly over mine.