I won't call you a goddess

I won't call you a goddess, because that exoticizes you;
I won't call you an amazon, because that fetishizes you.
I don’t want to say too much about your skin
because I don't want to seem like someone who has a black thing,
but it is beautiful because it is your skin,

and I'm unqualified to list
the things that beauty must resist,
like French cartoons, or bitchiness
from so-called feminists:
and I won't call you brave for fighting this

because the choice lies with the system you must fight,
which uses words like nude and natural for white,
and minority to mean most of the people on this Earth.
You are no muse: your beauty's independent of these words,

and that would be the same whoever wrote them,
and it's not my job to speak your truth:
my job is just to signal boost
so more people can hear the truth you've spoken.

This didn't actually start out being about Laverne Cox's Allure photoshoot, and Meghan Murphy's ridiculous, clickbaity attack on Cox, but, as I've been thinking about that a lot this week, it found its way in there; as indeed did the racist cartoon about dead migrants published this week by those fearless speakers of truth to power, Charlie Hebdo (who I've written about before).