I knew this when I was a child, watching the women in my life glide across rooms in beautiful colors, dancing in bare feet, hollering so the neighbors could hear and join in the laughter; in salons, in church, on the stoop, at the movies (being shushed), and all over the corners of my life. Growing up, I received many messages that this truth was dead wrong and I struggled to believe that the beauty I saw in the women in my sphere could also apply to me. And when I did believe, I was able to embody it at last.

We are Seeds

Accept that you are a beautiful thing

The kind of creature only poetry can convey

And when you transcend from this world

And into the next

Your skin will still be the color of earth

Your eyes the color of mountains

Your hair the fabric of grain

Your heart the cradle of children

And your womb the soul of the world

when they try to jail your mind and

hide this precious knowing from reaching your feet

you live half a life with half your staff

We are the seeds of the ancestors

Beat back the strangling envy

its ignorance and irreverence

Mon cher, they want to love you

but would rather battle this need

than be buried in its treasure

-qv