The Next Step

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by ursula474

by ursula474

Climbing a staircase
Surrounded in whiteness
Always known as blinding light

And I link arms
Trusting you to push me back up if I fall
If I fall you promise I will feel
Your hands at my back
Hard and firm
Calling it
Solidarity

My feet feel uneasy as the closer to the precipice I am
My feet feel the ground start to mimic rubble
Growth mimicking destruction

Ground less certain
The atmosphere more thin
Pressing on my neck
But
I can still breathe

Still
Lying down on the cracked obsidian rock
Eyes shut
Knowing it is shaky
Knowing it could cut me
Knowing it already has

I say when I reach the top
For only the start and the end of my journey is certain
I will look back in the middle

See her defiant determination
Like a nuclear bomb on her features ready to go off
Cup the memory of her face in my hands
And she will still be precious
Still be black
Still worth just as much then as now

Back on the ground face to God
Leaving the 99
To save the 1
My messiah won't you feast on the bread already broken?
Catch your breath and sip on wine already poured
Your body a baptism in its own sweat

I hear god speak in my blindness
To my soul they say
When I made you in my image
I told you nothing about
Projections of love

I washed you in holy oil
Your body facing the east
Underneath the Bodhi tree
In the heat of the ninth hour

I birthed you
Hoping your message will not be distorted
I didn't make you from clay to be afraid of a couple cracks

I gave you an origin
Tell me your next step

My feet weary
I let my braids drop to them and swipe at my fallen tears
Rising
I say
Let there be love
Let there be no leader of it but a clear message
Let black children grow up and shine like light through a prism
I bless our men with fragility
I bless our women with solace

And when my voice is sore from metaphors I call for action
I call for doctors who don't believe black women to be barred from practice
I call for black therapists to be born in numbers so that our community can heal

Nobody can hear us better than us

I call for black boys to know how to use sign language before they know a gun
Sounding from my lungs the need for art literature science and languages

So that when they grow up
And they will grow up

They will have each other
Bonds forming
Memories moulding into membranes
Wrapping around them like vines
Blooming with bake sales and school trips Strengthened from championships ending in matches and medals

I want their parents to be able to slow down
Pockets full of black money with less tax
And their own businesses
And say I'm so so proud of you

I don't know if I will get there
But the ground looks awfully far down from up here