Devery Landrum

Pearls
 
you 
stepped from the soul of your jet-black skin
wishing yourself bright as stars at midnight,
like them so pretty white, 
a woeful delight.
why can’t you be like them if you pretend?

go
bleach your skin, unkink that nappy hair straight,
speak proper English 
white enough to pass;
just a shadow in the back of their class
learn to love their blue-eyed, blond-haired traits.

true 
whiteness whitewashes you, yet demonstrates
the blessings their unholy one-drop rule
made black and white pearls into golden jewels, 
for those pearls the rarest of love, life would complicate.

they bleached your soul, and jinxed your unique skin
without mercy, a tribe lost, the color black a sin.

Devery Landrum has worked as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker specializing working
with children and adolescents for over twenty years.  He has been writing poetry
since he was in high school and has had poems in The San Fernando Journal, Blindman’s Rainbow, Writer’s Cramp, Sounds of Poetry, The Sunday Suitor Poetry Review, Lucid Moon, and the Society of American Poets.  He is a member of The Writers Center in Bethesda MD.