Finally got the text I could pick up from this incredibly powerful piece by Joshau Bennet.
I watch / read it every time I slip and forget my worth... Enjoy
1. I wish I could put your
voice in a jar. Wait for those lonely winter nights when I forget what God sounds
like, run to the nearest maximum security prison and open it. Watch the
notes bounce off the walls like ricochet bullets etching keyholes into the
sternums of every brother in the room. Skeletons opening, rose blossom
beautiful to remind you that the way to a black man's heart is not through his
stomach, it is through the heaven in your hello, the echo of my unborn galaxy
that pounces forth through your vocal chords, and melts ice grills into oceans,
baptising our lips, until harsh words fade from our memories, and we forget why
we stopped calling you divine in the first place.
2. When I was born, my mothers' smile was so
bright it knocked the air form my lungs. And i haven't been able to breathe
right since. it’s something about the way light dances off of your teeth. the
way the moon gets jealous when you mock her crescent figure with the shape of
your mouth, queen. you make the sky insecure. Self-conscious for being forced stares
at your face every morning, and realise that the blues of her skin was painted
by that symphony doing cartwheels on your tongue.
3. Who else can make kings out of bastards? Turn a
fatherless Christmas into a floor full of gifts and a kitchen that smells like
the lord is coming tomorrow. We must eat well tonight. I used to think my
sister was a blacksmith. The way she put fire and metal and made kitchen
miracles at 14. Making enough food
to feed a little boy who didn't have the words to say how much she meant to him
back then, or didn’t have backbone to say so the day he turned 20.
4. Your skin reminds me of everything beautiful I
have ever known. The colour of ink on a page, the earth we walk on, and the
cross that held my Saviour
5. I’ve seen you crucified too. Spread out on
billboards to be spiritually impaled by millions of men with eyes like nails, who
make martyrs of your daughters. So I’m sorry for the music videos, for Justin
Timberlake at the Superbowl, and the young man on the corner this morning. Made
you just want to shed your flesh and become invisible. Never doubt, they only
insults you because... men are confused. We’re trained to destroy or conquer
everything we see from birth.
6. If I ever see Don Imus in public I’ll punch him
in the face, one time, for every member of the Rutgers and Tennessee women's
basketball teams. Then i'll show him a picture of Phylicia Rashad, Assata
Shakur, Eartha Kitt, my mother, my grandmother, and my 7 year old niece who’s
got eyes like fire bombs, and then dare him to tell me that Black women are
only beautiful in one shade of skin.
7. You are like a sunrise in a nation at war. You
remind people that there is always something worth waking up to.
8. When we are married I will cook. Do the dishes,
and whatever else it takes to let you know that traditional gender roles have
no place in the home we build. So my last name is an option. Babysitting the
kids a treat we split equally, and our bed will be an ancient temple, where I
construct altars of wax on the small of your back. We make love like the sky is
falling; Moving to the rhythm of bed springs and Bel Biv Devoe, angels applauding
in unison, saying this is the way it was meant to be.
9. My daughter will know her fathers' face from
the day she is born. And I can only pray that this superman complex lasts long
enough, for me to deflect the pain this world will aim at her from the moment
she's old enough to realise that the colour brown is still not considered human
most places. But my daughter will have a smile like a wheelchair, and so even
when I am at my worst, when the kryptonite of this putrid planet threatens to
render me grounded, the light dancing off of her teeth, will transform the
shards of my broken body into heart-shaped blackbirds, taking flight on the
wind that reminds me of my saviours hands, of my daughters' smile, of my
mothers' laugh when I was in her womb.
10. Never stop pushing. This world needs you now
more than ever.
