Black Woman Rise

Black Woman Rise

In the depth of her silenced solitude she rose
She heard the shot when Yaa Asantewaa fired her gun,
While her infant was strapped to her back,
In a cloth barely enough to cover her hips
She saw when Harriet led the slaves on the underground
She saw the Truth when Sojourner provoked justice

She walked on the Sahara, tracing
The footsteps of her lost children
She heard when Kilimanjaro echoed
The cries of her stolen children

She cradled King's infants
When they asked for their daddy
She saw when they locked her
Mediba for twenty-seven-years
She heard when they said Winnie had
Become a fallen woman

She fed the starving Ethiopian
And rocked the orphaned
Ugandan to sleep while
Aids rained upon the continent

She's the houchie mama
Who houched from pimp to pimp
On the streets of Harlem
To put food on her children's plate
She's the ghetto queen who fucked the brothas
To put her bastard son through college

She screamed when the body bag at morgue
Revealed the face of her son
And roll of thunder heard not her cries
While the rainbow was not enuf and the
Unmerciful cloud rained unto her cheap
Mascara to her payless shoes

She read when Halle got her Oscar
She saw when Jo-Lo was awarded
The benefits of what should have been hers
She read when Beyounce
Bounced her acclaimed bump
And became the commodity
Of the twenty-first Century
She rose out of the concrete
She travelled from Sahara to Georgia
She is the most knowledgeable
Most educated, most persecuted
She struggles through centuries-centuries
Arise!
She is no other than a
Black woman