a brief meditation on black

at college,
we were taught red is for danger.
black is for sorrow. white is for peace.
today,
it becomes the best way for me to
slice metaphors into poems;
in poetry,
the symbolism for good is white,
& bad is black – say a black bird perch
on your roof or
a black dog chases you into the mouth
of a dark room.
darkness too is black &
night alone is an allusion to darkness.
manna is white. angels wear white.
the devil is a castaway made of black.
I try to write this poem with imageries
that stand between summer & winter.
i look at my skin & see
bad metaphors,
bad symbolisms that touch
the gene.
god!
but you said everything you created
are all good,
& when you said man is created in your image,
did you mean by shape and not by colour?

Taofeek Ayeyemi, fondly called Aswagaawy, is a Nigerian lawyer, writer and author of the chapbook Tongueless Secrets (Ethel Press, 2021) and a collection “aubade at night or serenade in the morning” (Flowersong Press, TBD 2021). His works have appeared or forthcoming in Contemporary Verse 2, Lucent Dreaming, Ethel-zine, Up-the-Staircase Quarterly, FERAL, ARTmosterrific, Banyan Review, tinywords, the QuillS and elsewhere. He won the 2021 Loft Books Flash Fiction Competition and Honorable Mention in 2020 Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize among others. He is @Aswagaawy on Twitter.