Black Butterfly

roots.

I can still remember all the lessons
my grandmother taught me.
She taught me about the beauty
and brutality of life.
She told me that my scars made me,
and I should never be broken by
the stories behind them.

Every day, she gives me new songs to sing
and new stories to tell.
Today she told me something
that I remember as this:

We are all poets at heart.
We are all singers and songwriters at heart.
We take our journeys
and condense them into
smaller, less painful stories
and we sing them or we find a rhyme for them.
We write out our pain onto paper
with ink flooding our pages
like blood from the wounds of time
and that makes them hurt a little less.

We write songs to sing to the young
and we hide little easter eggs in them.
Our songs are joyful,
like the young we sing them to
but they hide a secret.
They are songs that hide wounds
and only the old really know where those wounds are from.
The sadness is hidden by the drumbeats
of a thousand tears
that were shed by my ancestors.
With pain that is rooted in deep in their souls,
with pain that is passed down in my roots,
my ancestors sing as loud as they can.

This is no ordinary poem,
this is a cry of gratitude.
I am grateful to those
who burdened themselves
with the image of my happiness
sewn deeply into their mind's eye,
so that I could be free.

They fought for me
and now, it's my turn.
I have to find a way to win
all the fights that plague people like me.
I have to find ways to heal the pain
that runs deep in my roots and break the curses.
and maybe, just maybe,
my children will not have to fight as hard.

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AUTHOR'S NOTE:

I chose to write a poem about things that remind me of my history (the history of the black community's struggle) because it is a part of who I am, it is a part of what makes me and what has made me.

And that's why this is the opener for this chapter.
It's me reflecting on the past, to move into my future with a greater understanding and respect for where I have been.

The stories my grandmother tells me about how she grew up inspire me to write out her pain and to give her, and others like her, a better understanding of the future that they will have in me and in every child that chooses to acknowledge their heritage and take that history with them on their journey to the future.

My grandparents and my parents had a hard time growing up. Too many nights spent with tears in their eyes and days spent fighting wars at home and outside on the streets. So, it's up to me to break the curses that may plague those in my bloodline and give those that come after me a better beginning and a stronger foundation to build on.

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