Long emerald leafy hair
Dancing in the salty wind.
My rippling sapphire dress
Rolling against my sandy tanned knees.
Animals of all kinds
Race about where they please.
My people where once simple and happy,
And lived off what I made for them from my land.
We were peaceful together,
Long before the wretched colonization began.
My fears came in the forms
Of European foreigners.
First the enigmatical French,
Then the British Westerners.
Their strange people sliced off
My long emerald hair.
They took far more
Than my people ever did dare.
They stripped me of my crops,
They sullied my oceanic blue dress.
They laughed, then attempted to sooth
My quivering fearful distress.
They dug deep into my skin
And sucked away my black life-blood.
They forbade me from speaking the language of my kin.
At long last, they finally sailed away
But I remained here.
It is those all-powerful, haughty Europeans I hate.
Yet it is those same innovative Europeans I want near.
I sought refuge in the hands of my traumatized people
As they tried their best to bandage my physical, physiologic, and emotional wounds.
They covered my sad and confused eyes
To keep me ignorant of my body that I knew was in crumbling ruins.
They tried scrubbing away the pollution from my ruined dress
And tied back my pitifully dead chartreuse hair.
I heard their grumblings in English, but predominantly in French
They claimed that my condition wasn't fair.
Still, I sit on my beach shore and wait.
I am now a stranger among my darker skinned family.
I watch a thousand sunsets and a thousand sunrises go by,
Before the Westerners come back for me.
I am jubilant that France and England have returned.
I'm so excited that they are here again.
A part of me knows that this masochistic relationship
Must not become an ungodly trend.
They smile and ruffle my hair.
Somehow, something feels different this time.
Their words are still sickly sweet,
And they still want what is mine.
They offer to turn me into a paradise, their paradise.
Their wealthy little toy doll
In a kingdom, they smirk and promise
To poverty and warfare it will fall.
I can't say no, so I say yes.
If only to put the longing in my heart to an end.
I threw away that last part of me and raced into their awaiting arms,
And, like them, became another European.