This word that keeps poppin’ on my Instagram feed
Means so little, so it seems
To crafty marketers and vacuous beauties
Hash-tagging like tomorrow
Will never come
Kindled to autoignition point,
Melanin shot golden stars out of their hiding places
Dark skin became acceptable
No more shame, if looks can be deceiving
But shame is in the exploitation of the word
To make the very dollars that enslaved the melanised
Melanin, the tool of the opportunists
The Greeks gave melas, ascribed from its genitive melanos – or dark
From Modern Latin came its chemical suffix -in
Whilst the Lithuanians ascribed it as blue
And Anglicised diction delivers it as \ˈme-lə-nən\,
Ignoring its pain, Sanskritisation maintains
It is dirty, stained, black
The cause and effect
Of the discourses on colour
Melanin, now condensed into digestible bites
On social media land
Melanin, the reason why some girls are denied leadership
And why some men take to boat from red sand
Melanin, the pigment of the oppressed
Can you not see how we remain entrapped?
This lie that was created by hierarchies of power,
To keep woman from claiming her intuitive strength
We are all guilty of this deceit,
Diligent consumers that we are
Reproducing injustice, denying the truth that melanin
Means murder for some
A Melanin mixed with Capitalism should never be the way to win back our freedom