I am it
The one who was never it
The liberty of free eagles scouting the blue skies
Yet still the same one from their past stories
Of sadness and unimaginable grief
The one who is said to have tasted loving love in brief.
I am a blooming Jacaranda
And the hut I was born in was no bigger than a verandah
I hail from a kitchen full of choking smoke
Everything I ever spoke
Had to be verified from other folks.
I am a revenant of some angry ancestors
Men who watched their own ferried
Into the stretch of southern waters
The one who came back from restless spirits of some deranged souls
Cast deep below the ocean floor.
I am a pot of black gold
The proof that life began on my violated home soil
I bear a skin like no other in this populated world
The mark of the first man to ever toil
While traded like owned cheap soil.
I am the underrated breed
A half baked feminist tired of this crippling patriarchy
Backed by the undiluted misogyny
Persistently making my insides bleed
Wondering if they will ever embrace equality.
This is a freewrite written while my mind was trying to find what to write. I am not sure where it sprouted from but in my digging and rearranging and unlearning, celebrating self is becoming more essential. I am healing so self love has been the fuel upto to this point and sometimes it comes like this.
Drenched in painful history and annoying present. Sometimes there's a voice in background of my mind shouting that there are millions and millions of black women feeling like so and the humility of knowing that I am not only speaking for myself but for other women too humbles my pens.
Sometimes it is incorporated into this ever present desire to shake some sense into people's minds. I call myself a half baked feminist as I believe in equality more than I believe in toxic feminism. I am human like that.