Our Mothers
(for my aunt, Birdie Lou Powell)
What would we be without you?
Even God herself
Knows that our mothers
Are miracle angels
Swiping away the sun’s burns and tears
With their leatherlike hands
We mean
Mother mom ma mommy mama mami
Give birth to the earth daily
Transport the moon and stars on their backs
Work like hungry ancestors in orange fields
Smuggle their invisible dreams in swollen ankles
Sing blue songs that hang trees, double-dutch the breeze
And capture the motherland in a sneeze
We mean
Our mothers
Build and create and create and build
Things
Like civilizations and imaginations and love
Even when they get no love themselves
We mean
Our mothers
Are spirit and energy brushing buckets of paint
Beneath our feet
Means our mothers
Are magicians
Here even when they are not
Here even when they are not
Here even when they are not
___
For Cicely Tyson
Girls
Women
Black girls
Black women
especially
rarely told
they
are
smart
gifted
beautiful
special
dope
all in a single, relentless breath
But you are—
Africa and the West Indies
hatched you in Harlem
when Langston and Zora
penciled the blues
and Blackness
into your diamond-slanted eyes
as Ma Rainey and Marcus Garvey
swayed and screamed that
little Black girls
like you
are stars wherever they are
not just the help
not just the mattress
not just the punching bag
not just the mammy
not just the poll watchers or the pole dancers
but miracle chocolate goddesses
who
overcame and overcome
human-made diseases
like racism and sexual oppression
to straighten and afro pick a world
where you
pose poetic and pretty-like for magazines
run miles and miles to rescue jazz kings from themselves
and spiritually anchor movies that make Black folks
sounder and sounder in them fields
on them buses
in them African villages
in them classrooms
through the violent and paranoid walls of history—you are our history
Cicely Tyson
in your 96 years
you gave us
to us
the way our mommas
gave
to us
buttered grits
or breadfruit and plantains
on a Saturday morning
you gave us
to us
the way Harriet Tubman
gave freedom back
to a stolen people
who did not know
they were
suppose
to
be
free
you were/are our freedom
you were/are what freedom
looks like
when
a little girl from Harlem from anywhere
shaves her head bald
glues on eyelashes that tickle the sky’s belly
squeezes her neck with jewelry from the motherland
stares quietly into a camera like the fearless queen she is
fact-checks anyone who thinks dark skin ain’t the Lawd’s blessing
and sings the ancient and sacred words
of a woman who done seen some things
and is ready for her rest:
“I like me
just as I am….”
___
BIO
Kevin Powell is a poet, journalist, civil and human rights activist, and author of 14 books. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
