Dedication 
 
My people wear histories
stitched on our skin, entwined in bone.
 
forming fragments of all our identities,
carving in us a poetry older than words.
 
My people descend from ancestors erased from history 
books. Speaking in languages survived through song and story. When
 
written, they would leap from pages rendering my words inadequate
to compare the beauty of our Blackness.
 
When our libraries were set alight,
we rubbed the ashes together
 
and formed names for our future generations
to store sacred stories for our survival.
 
My people yearn to know where our gods are buried,
to avenge their deaths, destroying the missionaries that killed them.
 
 Visiting their gravesites, we fashion amalgamations
of spiritualities returning us back to soil, and sun.
 
                                                    	The elements we occupied before, bone, breath, and light.
 
My people are well versed in reading vanishing ink,
often found tracing letters in foreign library books fusing
 
the missing puzzle pieces of our lineage.
My people attend museums and visit our dead,
 
worshipping effigies trapped behind glass prisons.
We crave the mystery embedded in each captured object –
 
we yearn to bury our ancestor's bones, to return our belongings.
My people find thrones on bamboo mats,
 
to have our crowns plaited onto us
adorned by the hands of alchemists who
 
imbue new magic from old tradition. We,
who are blessed to inherit ancient alchemy, arisen and alive!
 
my people, are those who were told to forgo our ancestors,
as if they aren’t venerated in our hip’s sway.
 
No leather-bound spines hold their words, yet – we,
their descendants remain with echoes of ancestral memory
 
                        	     	                      pouring out from our veins.
 
My people carry rhythm in the blood, that grows us
into poets and percussionists. We learnt to sing from
 
Our Mothers’ voices
bestowing a symphony orchestrated by God herself.
 
My people revolt with rocks clutched in our fists, labelled terror
because we give hell, we garner
 
warmth from the cinders of burning imperial flags
and gather strength from our revolutionaries,
 
here and gone, their bones vibrating under the earth
their songs, billowing with the wind.
 
My people inherit names that force colonial mouths to cower,
and expand worlds when pronounced aloud.
 
Names declaring a new language on your tongue,
and occupying a sacred place in the mind of anyone who conjures them.
 
I tell you; my people are poetry older than words, living
prayers preceding psalms pressed on pages,
 
                                                                    	                      my people, remarkable, in every way



Kinfolk/Skinfolk (I know because my sister, I am you) 

Terra cotta lifelines,
brown pigmented nail beds
subtle against an infinite canvas.

Your mouth safeguards portals of 
soft soil un-swallowed on your tongue. 
The blended shades dotted on your face, 

between the folds of your arms,
and behind your knees - 
I know all about these

spaces that store all our 
brown sugar, stirred into Black tea  
undiluted, dense, dark and deep. 

I know, because my sister, I 
am you. I am you on your good days. 
When the freckles on your face 

beckon the sun to rise. 
I rise with you and greet the 
careless love swimming in the wind, 

in the moments we can almost 
drown in the earth’s perfect elements. 
I know, because my sister, I am you. 

I am you on your worst days. 
When the tears on your face 
dare the sun to rise. 

I rise with you, and succumb 
beneath the dominance 
of a world never made for us.  

I see myself in every black femme
who has left this earth too early, knowing, 
always knowing, she could have been me. 

I, too, am the women carving their writing 
against their bones, poetry leaping
from inside their marrow. 

I, too, am the women 
who bury truth inside their teeth, unravelling
their last poem in their suicide note.

I, too, am the women carrying fire inside 
their palms, hands held up, against the sizzling point 
of a policeman’s bullet. 

I, too am the women strangled inside the grip of 
the men of my skinfolk. The ones who wear a bruised
curse on their lips, where a soft kiss should be.

I, too am the women who have sculpted themselves
into the right body, teaching their sisters how to transcend
beyond binary, becoming magic and miracle. 

I, too am the women who exist inside 
a dream deferred and a dream denied, 
inherited from a lineage of wounded mothers. 

I, too am the women who will never wear 
the spoils of their hard work, who yearn to adorn their fingers 
in the diamonds they pry from the earth’s core.

I, too am the women who are now gone, weaving fingers 
between puffs of clouds, cornrowing constellations, 
connecting ancestors and their descendants. 

I, too, am the women who are the songs 
of protest. I am the voice these devils will never kill. 
The revolution of my kinfolk is in my breath. 

This is why you will always find me 
inside the vibrato of a Black girl’s voice.
Their poetry is shared on my tongue.

I bless the poets born under the African sun 
I bless the fighters born under the African sun 
I bless the writers born under the African sun 
I bless the singers born under the African sun 
I bless the sisters born under the African sun
I bless the daughters born under the African sun.

*Photo by Erik Adair on Unsplash