Category: Poetry

Love Poems Challenge – The First Time

Ok ok.. I’ll take part in the challenge, you pulled my arm :).

So, my first poem for Lisa’s Love Poem Challenge for National Poetry Month is the audio version of a poem I posted here awhile back called “The First Time”. Dedicated to my husband, I only posted part of it. This is the whole thing.

(If there are any issues with the audio, please let me know in the comments section. Otherwise, enjoy! )

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What are you waiting for? Join the fun! > https://rebirthoflisa.wordpress.com/2015/04/02/new-challenge-for-national-poetry-month/

If These Walls Could Talk

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They would scalpel the mask off your face
Pull back the deception bleeding from your eyes
And reveal how dark you really are.
A slave to the ignorance pulsing from your mouth
Cloned imagination
Words bending, tainted by the cold lashes of society
Originality lying desolate
The inability to bring forth substance
Meat
And bone
Without nourishment
No cultivation
Of the mind
If these walls could talk
they would verbalize the truth
that you starve of love
dish out hatred
but cannot take it
glossed over and hidden beneath a poetic lyric
you love blindness
infatuated with the concept of searching your face in the shadows
chasing tails
finding no where
and understanding none at all
it is easier to be real
than to be mask
a lesson too many have not yet learned
what kind of life really exist inside the pen of a poet?
The things they would tell
If only these walls could talk
And you know what

they do.

In-between the Lines

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Trees that died in vain
Wasted paper
Blind post
Wingless words
On a road to nowhere
Reaching no one
It seems
invisible value
but learn to value what the eye cannot see
To dance to whispered songs
With loud messages
Screaming purpose
that it takes another set of eyes to see
Regular eyeballs just can’t
Invisible trees stand erect in that storage place
Invisible bank accounts
Unseen credit
A worth beyond the U.S. dollar
cuz its backed by paper
but these trees never die in vain
wasted paper
blind post
wingless words
on a road to somewhere
behind the eyes
a purpose beyond the page
and in-between the lines

Guest Feature – To My Momma

“Who thinks her money talks louder than her womanhood” ….whew, this line!

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To my momma,
Who has swallowed the amerikan dream
And chocked on it
To my momma,
Whose dreams have fought each other—
And died.
Who sees,
But cannot bear to see.
A volcano eating its own lava.
To my momma, who couldn’t turn
Hell into paradise
And blamed herself.
Who has always seen
Reflected in her mirror
An ugly duckling.
To my momma,
Who makes no demands of anyone
Cause she don’t think she can afford to.
Who thinks her money talks
Louder than her womanhood.
To my butchfem momma,
Who has always
Taken care of business
Who has schemed so much
She sometimes schemes against herself.
To my sweet, shy momma.
Who is uneasy with people
Cause she don’t know how
to be phony
And is afraid to be real
Who has longed for sculptured gardens
Whose potted plant
Dies slowly on the window sill
We have all been infected
With sickness
That can be traced back
To the auction block

To My Momma by Assata Shakur

 

The Twins Had a Brother

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dem twins lived around the corner
boys
chocolate
tall and smooth skinned like
dem twins
didn’t know they had a brother tho
till word got round bout the mind he left on his mother’s front porch
that ain’t a metaphor
his brains divided itself between the concrete and front porch of his mother’s front yard
I heard the dice did it
the way it be running across the concrete
acted like it didn’t know better
than to come walking out the palms of hands
like it didn’t smell the misery of struggle between the cracks
like it ain’t hear the whispering of people on top the rocks
feel the oppression slipping outta the hands of wanna be gangsta’s
why it ain’t just stop before turning up numbers
maybe dem twins woulda still had a brotha
it was a block of them that seen it
almost as normal as a street fight
the way lives don’t matter in the hood
all because of dice
and dollar bills
ain’t know dollars were so expensive
till it expended ole boys life
I wonder if he rolled a seven or eleven
Wonder what he ate for dinner last
Or how that dolla ended up in his pocket
Or if the dolla knew what was coming
But anyway it was a block of them who seen it
some got carried off to hide outs from ole boy
and some was taken out of school
I wanted to go too
go away from the stench of prophecy behind my house
away from the Isaiah’s and Deuteronomy’s leaning against they mama’s voice
making it sound all crazy like
and dem Leviticus’s standing on the corner
akin like the ground wasn’t still warm from ole boys blood
just around the corner from my house
when I found out
that the twins had a brotha

Womanhood Don’t Begin in Menstrual Cycles

Yecheilyah-72dpi-1500x2000-e-bookIs a collection of poems and inspirational quotes that focuses on womanhood. Scheduled for release at the end of this month, this book combines poetry with the strength of true womanhood. It will also feature an audio book of a selection of pieces. It will be available as an e-book as well as in print. I will also present opportunities for free copies to be given in exchange for a review. Details on that coming soon.

From Girlhood to Womanhood

When I got my first menstrual cycle at thirteen, I remember everyone being very excited. I remember them hugging me and explaining things I did not wholly understand. I was not very excited, but they were. This was obviously a very important part of my life that the adult women before me had apparently made clear. “Why was everyone so happy about this?”  I thought.

Today, the menstrual cycle is no longer symbolic of the great “Welcome to Womanhood” or “Rite of Passage” as it once was. Women are not excited to speak about it. They may feel it exposes the “nastiness” of too much information. And in most extreme cases, many young women do not understand what it is. What has degraded a woman’s transition from girlhood to womanhood? We do know one thing for sure: the maturity of a young woman’s mind yesterday as compared to today. It seems that at some point in our history, the growth of our little girls, especially within the black community, has depended so much on the shape of the body, that it has stumped mental growth. Young women walk around here today and they think turning eighteen or twenty-one automatically gives them a right to womanhood, although the cultivation of their mind is stuck in childhood. Many of them do not understand that womanhood is not just the outer appearance of what makes up a female. It is not breast, booty, vagina and hips, and it does not arrive necessarily with age. Though with age comes wisdom, not everyone who is of age is wise, and as such not even age itself can alone define womanhood. For this reason we cannot assume, for today’s woman, that her womanhood began the moment she bled her first menstrual cycle.