A Land Built on Crimes

Discover America—the land of 'freedom' built on conquest. White and black arrivals claim stolen ground, forging an unspoken pact of equality from a legacy of crime.

In the greatest land in history
There is equality and a mystery
It all come down to our common history
The birthplace of our modern story:

Once in a certain summer
White people came to an island
from Europe
and on another summer
Black people came to the same island
from Africa
The first arrivals committed a crime
And claimed the land
And the second committed a similar crime
To claim the land

The original owner
Would fall prey to the first thief
But the first thief
Would not fall prey
to the second thief
They know each other;
They are both thieves
So they agreed on something
That now exists:

"When I am black and you are white
And we share the same power
at once
You cannot make a law that kill me
And I cannot make a law that kill you
We will both respect our rights
and fight for our brothers all over the world
We are white and we are black
So we fight for both white and black. "

© Godwin Isiwu

Author's Note

While in an attempt to illustrate how like terms can attract and tolerate each other, the poem discusses a land whose original inhabitants had been wiped out by white immigrants who now settles and becomes the owners of the land. When black immigrants comes in to covet the land in turn, after the earlier whites, the whites refuse to give it up. Now, possibly after a war which might have or have not occurred, realizing they both are guilty of a crime, the immigrants agree to let one another settle on the land and instead secure it together against any other immigrant. The moral of the story is that a thief is more conscious of thievery than one who had never stolen, and will be more vigilant and evasive of thieves than the other; to track a or evade a thief, it’d be important to learn the ways of the thief. Note: The word Thief and other words associated with it as stated in this context may refer to any vice that is not acceptable to society including rape, kidnapping, serial killing, even money laundering, racism, political corruption and diplomatic fraud.