three brown children

with afros

like black woolly sheep

(or so they said)

sitting on our heads,

Seventies coconut-kids,

with soft shells that didn’t need

to be hit with a hammer to break

- how could we grow up

not thinking black equals bad

when she would tell us

we were just like him?

You’re just like your black

bastard of a Dad, she’d say.

to go back to the jungle

and make monkey noises.

Where I came from the only jungle

was made of concrete and coal dust

and grey smoky air,

and there weren’t any monkeys

in South Yorkshire

that I knew of.

The kids in our street would call us

a whole dung-heap of names -

Nigger, Blackie, Wog and Coon

were the favourites, nestled amongst the rest,

brought out from time to time

and brandished bravely

like a child’s plastic sword

to protect them from our blackness.

There were jokes galore about the time

being half-caste-two,

and they’d ask in the browness

washed off in the bath;

but the kids in our street still played

with us blackies,

with our hair like frightened sheep,

who were just beginning to learn

it was impolite to have been born;

and they still came in our house for tea.

After he’d married his English Rose

and discovered it wasn’t to be

a bed of pink roses,

sometimes he’d blacken

her eyes with bruises like plums

that she would try to hide

under eye-shadow the colour

of bluebottle’s wings

and her tortoiseshell specs.