Tradition: A Perilous Age in a Black Girl’s Life
A chill pricks my heart when I read the name
of the third enslaved girl to bear a child at age fifteen,
conception like clockwork proclaimed.
Some gossip to blame for declaring first blood:
ovulation oblique invitation on the plantation.
I pause to record the names of the nascent enslaved
and the many who have since taken the bodies of black women,
bending them to the will of money, science, nothing.
A soul and body dubbed commodity, chattel, property.
I learned something of this game
in a basement to an Isley Brothers’ jam,
no warning beyond Would you like to dance
then hardness ground into a hip
beneath some dude’s double-knits.
Wanting to run but pinned by a palm holding mine
in a roomful of swaying bodies and sweat shine
until the prayed-for end to that innocence-usurping time.
Something’s cooking in the kitchen and in the fields,
it’s bubbling up babies, sun scorching brow and hands.
Pick me a wonder, pick me a dream, how many hands
does it take to make heaven, a dearth of freedom
in this godforsaken land.
Structure
22 lines · 22 stanzas