Her hands are delicate from the burden she carries,
The lines seen on her palms trace journeys her ancestors traveled for her to be here today,
Her fingers grasp the pen firmly as she strokes a new narrative into existence,
Rings sparkle in the light with each motion as a symbol of sovereignty and culture,
Mehndi celebrates her heritage in a bashful pursuit for representation,
A female successor in the works,
Breaking the norms and defining her identity one step at a time.

A woman who shatters glass ceilings with cognition and reason fights with fortitude,
She is a scholar in the works,
Armed with ink and post-its she readily crafts her voice,
Expelling knowledge as she ventures into uncharted feats,
Victorious is her journey as she lives the unspoken dreams her ancestors could only fathom,
A testament to their contributions she decolonizes the dominant narrative,
Her enrollment is a keepsake for their sacrifices,
Marvel at her composition for resourceful and informed is her prose.

In the silence surrounding her she harbors solace,
with a candle burning her imagination and intuition is churning,
She scribes through the hours of the night to reason with the jigsaw of jargon outlined before her.

A scholar defying the norm,
a messy bun with a few strands undone,
that's the mark of her intellect,
it's the crown she carries.

a rise
Irondale as
home fries
are those
building law
in let
your love
of leaping
volt that
inquiry is
now our
world with
substance the
insistence only
flat with
an arc
of love

For ten long years, a brush in hand,
Its ink stained bristles, as yet, untried.
Today, I hold It before the court of kings;
For all I seek is recognition and ink.

Like a scholar in love with life,
And a warrior in stormy rage,
That's how he lived,
And that that's how he lived,

I heard of a man
who never owned a
television.  
Instead he bought
a set of solid oak
bookshelves stained
like mahogany.

With the money
he saved on cable,
he filled them with
classics like Plato,
Aristotle, and Dostoyevsky.
He studied Darwin
and Descartes, and
memorized poems by
Whyte and O'Donohue

Because he never
made the switch to
high definition, he
could afford trips to
Rome and Tuscany.
Walking those ancient
streets and resting
in those heavenly fields,

he learned the art
of attentiveness,
minding the
genius loci
of a place,
and setting
one's cadence to
the breath of the wind.

And in the end,
he had a few books
of his own,
but they taught
nothing new
other than
how to truly live.