This powerful collection of poems, based on one UM student’s experiences and perspective, empowers Black girls and women to be fiercely, unapologetically and wholly themselves in everything they do.
Black Body
In Physics class,
The professor defines a ‘black body’:
“A body that completely absorbs and emits light.”
Somehow,
Physics already knew
That one day, your body
Will forget that it is magic,
But your skin…
Your skin will remind you
That it is golden
That it takes in and gives back
All the sun has to offer,
And doesn’t that make you…
A Miracle.
Rainbow
When the world tells you that it does not see color,
Become a rainbow;
Stretch your limbs across the sky.
Let your Black disperse.
Show them
You are red on the days you become the angry Black woman;
Blue when you pull back tsunami waves—
There are oceans hidden inside you;
You are yellow on the mornings you rise like the sun;
Green on the days you become Mother Nature,
When you bend down to search for the beauty in your roots.
Your Black cannot be unseen.
Your melanin is a mixture of too many colors
For eyes not to notice.
Mother Nature
If nature is given the image of being woman,
Then isn’t she,
too,
imperfect?
Isn’t she flawed where her dirt-brown skin
Cracks, folds and caves into itself?
If Earth really is a woman,
Wouldn’t a Black woman know what it’s like
To be a force of gravity,
To constantly pull things back into herself,
To reclaim the things that were taken from her?
Wouldn’t a Black woman know what it’s like
To search for beauty in her own roots…
To be seen as more soil than magma,
More skin than soul?
If nature is given the image of being woman,
Then wouldn’t a Black woman know what it’s like
To feel ‘dirty’, uprooted, chopped down, and taken advantage of?
And after all this,
Wouldn’t a Black woman still be nothing short of magnificent?
If earth is a woman,
Oh darling,
Wouldn’t she be Black?
Dear Black Girl
Stop playing hide and seek with your voice.
Bite the hand that covers your mouth.
Look in the mirror with the lights on.
Your body is not an empty home.
Live in it.
You don’t have to see happiness
Before you allow yourself to feel it.
There is fire in your eyes;
Use it
To burn down all the bridges they said your color couldn’t cross,
Then walk on water.
You are heavenly.
words_toni-ann farquharson. design_olivia ginsberg.
This article was published in Distraction’s Fall 2020 print issue.
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