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Continental Shift

Here, I thought I was
talking about accents
and the great divide—
but I find that I am
speaking of oceans
and the Great Divide:
we are the diaspora,
the human race; do not
make the mistake of
limiting the definition
of that devastating word
to slavery or genocide,
for in the beginning of time,
our ancestors were
each and every one of them
Africans, and no stretch
of millennia or continental shift
can reverse the origin of the species,
even if survival of the fittest
has allowed the weak and the
starved to outnumber all the
rest, which is all the poet knows
and all the American cares to
know when inventories are surveyed
and enumerations conducted.

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