Fade to Black

“…embedded racism extended into the aesthetics of the medium itself…the technology and grammar of cinema and photography have been centered on the unspoken assumption that their rightful subjects would be white. . . The multicultural realities films increasingly reflect go hand in hand with the advent of technology that’s finally able to capture them with accuracy and sensitivity.” --The Washington Post, October 17, 2013

Only now can pixels completely capture
the mulatto ancestors born in Virginia,
the freedmen of Georgia, the sharecroppers
in Lafayette County, Arkansas, the winters
yellowing successive generations in Cleveland.
Only now does the camera rhapsodize
over the freckles’ pale blossoms,
continuing their spread, like seeds,
every year, each crop more noticeable
than the last. The lens focuses
on the pores’ gentle sag as the skin
ushers in the fourth decade; the areola’s
circular spill, nursing’s bulls-eye;
the faded ripples, broadening streaks
on the abdomen and thighs, smooth
reminders from their stretching boast
twice taut, now slack; the adolescent scars
on the left inside wrist-the only physical
reminder of a parents’ divorce; the darker
brown and black moles— little peppered
volcanoes once seen on Big Ma’s face—
now popping up, more each year. A closer
angle spotlights the spiral curl of the hair,
a decade free of chemicals, softer now,
assertive, tangled in reflection. Finally,
the close-up— a mirror, and I am discovering
how slow love is, even slower acceptance,
but traveling down the road I was born to know.

To read more of Teri Ellen Cross Davis’s work, go to www.depoetry.com/poets/201601/05_teri_ellen_cross_davis.html.