Knowing your life is decided without your say-so
How do you live?
Seeing yourself doing only sport or music
Wanting to be a fashion designer, president or CEO
Reminded you’re an alien in your birthplace
Committing crime by just moving your hand across a book’s pages
And being plural in public could spell a death sentence
Assumed to be a drug dealer
When you can’t tell weed from green chalk dust
Raised to burn the black out of your skin, your hair
And call the scars beautiful
Feared and fetishised for sexual prowess
You may be too young to even have
Encouraged yet forbidden to
Breed, marry, date, even glimpse
Anyone at the empty end of the melanin spectrum
Unaware that your womb, your tomb
And everything in between
Is a treasure
Accessible only to them and their progeny
How do you live?
Start with a decision
To heal your ears’ virginity from media penetration
To privately proclaim
Blackness equals greatness
Decide who you are, what you do
And how your destiny will go
Be the fashion designer, the president and the CEO
Let your example allow other greatnesses
To breathe their niches to life
And make them know they can and should surpass you
They can and should be
Emperors and empresses
– Regent not consort –
Cutting edge scientists
Creators of films, books, scripts, TV shows
And the execs with the bucks to make them happen
Architects, plumbers, electricians, farmers
Governors, lawmakers
Historians and
Above all else
Making history where our ancestors left off
Before they were so rudely interrupted
Excuse us
Greatness is coming through once again
How do you live?
© One Tawny Stranger, October 2016
