'For Colored Girls'

This poem is for adam’s rib/ protectors of life and of the heart of man/ this is for all those years. For colored and light skin and insecure and chocolate and thick girls and too much and not enough and seen but not heard/ this is for you. This is for me.  This is for us.

This is for light skinned girls/ when men assumed that because of your lack of hue, you were see through, a shallow body of water without depth or dimension/ this is for you/ the blue eyed blondes of the black community, I heard light skin is fair skin, but who referees these race games when color complexes cause us to question fair play/ this is for you

This is for the insecure girl who brings countless men into her womb only for them to pull out as boys/ she is unaware that it’s not really about sex, not about being wanted/ she’s just unconsciously trying to raise the boys she births into the men her father could never be/ baby this is for you/ a slave to everyone’s consciousness but her own/ she teeters on schizophrenia simply because she does not recognize her own voice among the many/ be still and listen and see and know that all you must hold onto is you/ this is for you

This is for chocolate girls/ when soap and water and steel wool rubbed vigorously was not enough to remove the unclean negative connotation they said was your skin/ this is for you/ for the victims of those “dark as night” “jokes” because I promise/ not a simile exists for the darkness of lynchings in the night/ there is no metaphor for the contrast between the fire of a burning cross in the foreground of a tar baby midnight sky/ this is for you

This is for the thick girls/ stallions/ thick legs, thicker shells who are sick and tired of getting superficially chose by dudes who synonymize curves with heauxs—pump ya breaks/ her body is holy/ her womb a fertile river estuary, every curve a bend in the great river Jordan/ if only you were invited to swim in its waters/ you are not dirty enough to be purified by her rushing currents- step in unworthily  and you will drown/ lungs fill quickly with the thickest of liquids, quench your thirst with this elixir/ no one woman should have all this power but baby know that you do/ this is for you. For all of you.

so this is for the black women.  Then and now.  who have ever questioned God's love-- His intention, His direction, His presence—I offer this poem to you as some sort of meager reparations for a lifetime of perpetual misunderstanding and misinterpretation. For those times when we couldn’t comprehend the divinity within ourselves let alone live in a way that summoned the rest of this world to do so. See this is a dedication & a call to action. See we are human. So nothing human can be alien to us. We’ve seen the assata shakurs, the michelle obamas, the sojourners, the audre lordes, the maya angelous, Shirley chisolms and angela davis’s. We’ve seen IT happen. there is no excuse for this mediocrity we dwell in. change has come, greatness has been achieved so this if for you. Colored girl. Black woman. Stop waiting for someone to honor you. & honor the divinity within yourself.