Echoes of your unblemished skin
Could never dessert history,
Only augment the contemporary
Noise of your transcendent legacy
Deafens all comparisons
Mutes all aspirants
Tapestries of cornrows, basalt tendrils
Ivory-paintings of your skin, her olive glow
Trademarked with your name
Your beauty is like a lethal asp
Poisoning the many pretenders
– Vivienne, Claudette, Liz or Sophia –
Incarnations of you
And in this boundless dominion of a gender’
Perfection can only be exiled
On your island
Where Julius and Mark were once castaways,
Marooned,
In your physiognomy.
