Rethabile introduced me to Geoffrey Philp a couple of months ago - now I visit his blog all the time. This poem he wrote reminds me of the conversation a few weeks ago here on Black Looks on xenophobia, belonging and the words not to call people

Red by Geoffrey Philp

It burst from those lips that I’d adored, “You’re just too red!”
The curse of being apart, neither black nor white, but red
followed me through the streets, staining the shadow
of those fires that flared behind my mother’s garden: red
ginger towering over anthuriums with their naked phalloi
straining against the bark of the live oak, stunned red
petals bending in the sunlight to the weight of shame,
their pliant skin absorbing yellow and blue to become red
like the way by resisting we become the thing we fear the most–
as I now accept this blessing freed from race. Call me Red.

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Poetry + Caribbean