We Built This Voice
Original EveryPoem Studio house-voice poem.
They tried to write us
out of the story.
Edited us to margins.
Moved us to footnotes.
Buried us
in the back of the book
where the index lives
and nobody looks.
But we kept speaking.
From the field.
From the church.
From the kitchen table
where grandmothers
turned nothing
into enough
and called it dinner
and called it love
and called it
the only revolution
they were allowed.
We sang in chains.
Do you understand
what that means?
Not the metaphor.
The fact.
We made beauty
out of a condition
designed
to destroy beauty.
And the beauty won.
Every poem
written by a Black hand
is an act
of architectural defiance—
a building
constructed on land
someone said
we couldn't own
and couldn't build on
and couldn't name.
We named it anyway.
We named the sorrow.
We named the joy.
We named the specific shade
of tired
that comes from smiling
at a world
that hasn't decided yet
whether you're
fully human.
This month they celebrate us.
One month.
As if our history
has edges.
As if our story
starts in February
and ends
when March
changes the subject.
But we don't need
a month.
We need the whole book.
The whole story.
The whole truth.
We built this voice
from everything
they tried to take.
And now it's loud enough
that even the margins
can hear it.
Come. Listen.
This is not history.
This is now.
238 words · 73 lines · Free Verse