#Melanin

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