Poems About Perseverance and Not Giving Up

This is for the person who is dying and knows it and has to sit at dinner with people who are pretending they don't. And for the people at the dinner who are pretending they don't because saying it out loud would make the pasta taste like goodbye. Dying is not the hard part. Dying is just the body closing the accounts. The hard part is the living you do while you know— the coffee that still tastes good, the dog that still needs walking, the morning that arrives with the indecency to be beautiful. Someone is reading this right now and they know. They know the exact weight of a prognosis and the exact way the doctor looked away before saying the word. I want to say something useful. I want to say something that matters. But the only honest thing is this: I don't know what it's like. I'm not going to pretend. But I know that you are still here, reading this, which means you are still choosing mornings. And that is not small. The world doesn't know what to do with you. The cards all say wrong things. The pamphlets are useless. Everyone hugs too hard or not hard enough. But this poem knows: you are brave and you are scared and you are both at exactly the same time and that is the most human thing there is.

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.

You will outgrow shoes. This is expected. You will outgrow clothes, bedrooms, the backseat of the car where you once felt enormous. But you will also outgrow things that don't have sizes. Friendships that fit you at fourteen will be too small at twenty-five. This is not betrayal. This is the body of your life growing the way bodies do— not asking permission, not apologizing. You will outgrow the need to be liked by everyone. This is the most expensive thing you'll ever lose and the most important. You will outgrow the version of yourself that said yes when it meant no. The one that laughed at things that weren't funny. The one that shrank to fit into rooms that were never built for you. Growing up is not linear. It's not a ladder. It's more like a house you keep renovating— knocking down walls, finding rooms you didn't know were there, learning to live in the mess of construction while still calling it home. Some days you will miss the smaller version. The one who didn't know what she didn't know and was happier for the ignorance. That's okay. You can visit her. You can't move back in. Because growing is not a choice. But growing well— with grace, with honesty, with the courage to leave rooms that no longer fit— that's the bravest thing you'll ever do on a regular Tuesday.