This morning, I hosted a family reunion at the altar. 

The altar was my body 

My tears transformed into libation as they rolled like rain down the window of my face

My thoughts reshaped into incense, filling the air with a fragrant truth:

I know that I AM exactly what my ancestors dreamt of when bloodied backs kept them up at night, and their feet longed for the rich soil of home. My liberation is the only offering they require. 

I come from a long line of women who divined through strength and vulnerability. Women who took no shit, while carrying babies on both hips. I was made to overcome, to be one with the thousands who died so that I could live. 

New mercies rise to the tip of my tongue

As I become

A multidimensional vessel for generational joy & abundance 

I prayed for peace 

Jah downloaded poetry

I prayed for a revolution 

Allah turned up the music 

Until melodies and harmonies were poured into community movements 

I prayed for forgiveness

And God molded my family into the shape of a 400 year old willow tree. 

Infinite impact reflected 

In the roots and fruits of 

collective subconsciousness

Capitalism usually consumes my creativity 

But these words were created to choke a colonizer. With heaven sent reverence for the cultures created out of federal negligence.

Niggas created jazz out of tin cans. 

Hip hop out of the hate they gave to innocent infants 

soul food out of scraps 

And afrofuturism out of anger.

Niggas finna make a new earth out of chaos and cracked clay 

We always find a way

rewinding the divine whispers 

To shape the world in our image with every free breakfast

Slow walk

Honest conversation 

And radical act of mutual aid 

The children of Compton & the Congo's hearts beat at the same pace as the infinite drum built and brought through

New Orleans and Nubia 

Providing cadence and bass to the villages that raised us 

To go on and beyond. 

Let's start a Renaissance and a Rent strike. Let's deport these colonizers. Let's eat like Malcolm X is sitting beside us. Let us be unconditionally unafraid for the first time. Now is the time to build indigenous connections so deep that they could never trace us. Let us be more like mushrooms. Mycelium can Alchemize death and darkness into our hearts desires. Endings deliver beginnings to those who see their connected truth. 

Waves of life once frozen 

In complex trauma, constant fight or flight 

Are warmed 

With loving kindness and time 

Even through the fire:

There are seasons that seed your soul

And moments that feed your soul

And I am ready to be fully present in both. 

The loam that nourishes the garden of my heart is clandestine, transcending

As decadent as Shea butter melting in my hands that

Moisturize strategies of care and blissful blessings. 

Once I take my last silent breath 

In this here body I call home

Tell them to remember me

For more than my Blackened skin and 

Battered bones

Lay me to rest in wet, life-bearing soil

Bury me at the feet 

of my ancestors renewed hopes and dreams

An oak tree that will live longer than my words on these sheets, one that will share my poems in the fall of fallen leaves

When I go, remember me

Don’t forget the ways I bled red, healing broken fragments of who this world made me 

For the ways I molded clay with my love, 

Laid bricks with my blistered hands

for the foundation of a house 

I may never get to live in.

Sacrifices they made for me,

I didn’t even know I was made 

Bear that burden for you. 

They didn’t forget to

Leave that truth folded

Into the making of me and you.

Remember us, 

My mama’s mama, my daddy’s mama - daddy's too

Remember them so that you will always have a way back to you.

Remember that this world tried so hard to make me forget - that I was, that I am, that I and we will always be.

They muffled their cries and screams so that I could  carry these seeds with me, hopes that they’ll land some place in you ready to bear new fruit.

I sit beneath the same tree that cradled all my mothers through listless grief. Must we never have to bear babies that we are too broken to love- to listen, to remember. 

New visions of what can be made of us, in you. Tell them, make them remember you too.