Shakespeare Character: Caliban
Topic: Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women
I cannot see myself in chrome and glass
Not in the screen, the gloss of magazine.
Art all afeared? Then prove it, kill me thus:
Erase the final trace of me, in words,
In image, mother was a witch, and dad
A devil still. I borne of Frankenstein.
The pain it is to see oneself in beasts,
In monsters, dug from well disposèd graves.
O would that I might simply tear away
This cloak, the shade of night which covers, eats
Me whole, fragmented, pick away this skin.
Alas tis sewn to me in permanence,
Impermanence, it was one more white lie.
That Prosper they had bid me filled my isle
With noise, with light, with white, and white and white
They built a ladder, then they chained my feet
The tops of mountains only take to snow.
The heights, the wealth, that I will never know.
Hard work translates to toil without an end,
A slave of modern day, cease to pretend.
My people, say you see? Mere liver spots to me.
Their skin is coffee, chocolate, never brown.
A decadence to swallow, guzzle down.
A concrete strip they built to split my isle.
Is it not they who steal my sisters while,
Their metal monsters roar and poison air,
While buried are my sisters everywhere.
If not so feared, now we’re commodified.
A beauty in this shroud of mine? Not seen,
Nor spoken in a tongue so red as mine.
So long ago, did I whitewash my mouth.
I speak to Prosper, and I cry to dream:
If here would lie a list of all twas stole,
T’would stretch the earth from pole to cursèd pole.
If here would lie all penance henceforth made,
Of grass, t’would cover barely half a blade.
My image beads like blood on chrome and glass,
Like it, I’m made of stuff that’s built to last.
