Blackness Is A Poetry

Contrary to the current state of the nation and how it tries to tell our story—when "all lives" desperately try to smudge out our melanin like a bad eraser wasting space on a No. 2 pencil, but we go no where—I love my blackness more than anything.

I love the way we have the strength not only to pray, hard and unyielding, but to forgive even when it doesn't feel deserved. When it isn't deserved, point blank period.

I love how we sound when joined together in song, whether organized or by impulse, the natural harmonies that arise and the feelings that permeate from those choral moments onto any ears nearby.

I love how dramatic we are, how we tell stories and our eyes wrinkle and out brows furrow, and the way our hands move when retelling even the simplest of anecdotes. Bodies swaying with narration.

I love our sweetness, our sass, our sarcasm, our wit, our sharp tongues, our sympathy.

I love our skin and how it glistens and glows, not burns and reddens, in the sun. How tints and hues of the darker human spectrum vary slightly, but the sameness is the only color we see. The only one that matters.

I love how our laughs are big and deep, wide and loud, with all of our teeth on display. Diastemata abound, indicative of the wide range of experiences we've endured as a result of where we all come from. Where we were born, bred and multiplied fruitfully, seeds of deeply rooted culture sown and reaped on our own land. Where we were uprooted, relocated, then forced to adapt and thrive.

I love the way our hair, course, coiled or kinked and without effort stretches up to the heavens like the coveted crowns that they indeed are.

And painfully enough, I love my blackness more than white America will allow me to. More that what they feel is safe, permissible, able to control and monitor. Marveling from the outside, while elbowing and stealing to get inside. To dissect and understand something that is ours and ours alone. Itching to sip from our well to quench their thirst for culture, spice, flavor, resilience, Godliness, MAGIC, not caring how, when or if it is replenished. Itching to get a taste of the cane sugar that is blackness, pure and unrefined. A flavor not theirs to grasp.

My blackness is too sweet for you. Too diverse and complex for you. Too potent for you. My blackness, a priceless treasure bestowed upon me from my Father, is a beautiful sonnet not designed for skimming. Not to be read and digested unless you really get it. And trust me, if you're not in it, of it, chances are you'll never get it. Sorry, not sorry.



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