I know today the world celebrates you
But in my heart, your festival plays all season
To craft songs in your praise is honour
And this wordsmith is honorable aplenty

I know I'll never know the pain
The way societies have pushed you when
You blinded them with your radiance
Now enlightened they can only apologise

Justice is the cry!
Tell me it is not my lone heart
I do not strive to appease,
it is just what every woman deserves
Even if I lend my hand to
just the ones close to my heart
They say intelligence comes from one's experience,
and wisdom from those of others'
Wise I have become,
so I pledge to be better than my fathers

One more time raise your voice, my little girl
One more time hold the ***** hand approach you
One more time cut that tongue that gave you the names
One more time take the  avatar of empowered "Maha Kali"
One more time be UNSTOPPABLE

Well great goodness, where on Earth do I start?
The Garden of Eden  … or the bottom of my heart?

How can I make this as honest and heartfelt as I can?
How would I share with every woman in the world, the emotions of every man?

Yes, we hold them in. It's about pride. It's about standing tough.
But you'd really not have us any other way … you love to polish what's rough.

And we really love you, make no mistake, to you we are forever beholden.
We'll not forget those meals and those band aides and all those clothes gently folden.

You taught us to tie our shoes and look after our sisters and brothers.
And that unless we are standing for something correct, we must always be kind to others.

From you we learned that women are our partners, other halves and mothers-to-be.
Which leads my poem in another direction … as I continue my praises with glee.

Our wives took up where our mothers left off and carry our hearts in their hands.
They made us soup when sick, bore us amazing children and walked beside us in the sand.

They undressed us when drunk, both for fun and when it was needed.
And stood understanding when we failed miserably, as their warnings went blindly unheeded.

No matter our place in failure, glory or fame, they were always standing by our side.
No matter our outfit, five o'clock shadow, even our beer belly …
they always stand there with pride.

And in the brave new age, where we all live, they now do things so amazing.
They race cars, cure diseases, head up companies and set many trails a blazing!

What would we do without these women from our birth to our end of days?
How do we love them, now and forever?
You simply can't count the ways!

They say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder
But sometimes I ask myself, how can this be?
Cause when I look with my eyes, I only start to feel resent
and I begin to despise, the things I realize like
how my women of color have been simplified, and hypserxualized
how the black woman's body has been used and abused and now
It personifies, sexuality and promiscuity, out of all the things media feeds us these are some of the worst lies
You see cause black women are queens, and when white culture saw their worth, they were rattled
They couldn't help but try to minimize and de-legitimize, and put a guise over the eyes of all that viewed her
She is not just a big ***, big lips or hips
She is the mother of humanity, in her essence from her hair, to lips to her fingertips she is a Queen, and she is to be respected.
And I will die for her honor, We will not go back into slavery days, I will not stand here while she gets up on stage naked and her body is dissected, and her soul, her essence neglected, her heart, her mind infected.
From these queens come the workers, the Kings, without the black woman we have no past and we have no future
We must protect the black woman, for she is sacred like scripture.

World is given through her womb
Life by her love
She's a shooting star
Fulfilling the dreams of others
Forgetting her ones.

We don't dare to appreciate her
We don't care to her feelings,
Nor her dreams.
She swallows her pride
To serve us might.

Love her, she loves you tonnes
Ignore her, she loves you loads
Ignores our ignorance
And tolerates our flaws
Complaining never

Her cries are often unheard
With tears invisible,
Trauma a smile
Patience at infinity
With words unspoken.

She's a ocean
Vast to explore
Hard to understand
But plain as river
With thoughts deeper.

Her self respect
Often misspelled as ego,
Society mocks her down earth
And she raises like a tree
From a buried seed

Her every move
Is judgemental,
With several eyes poking her
And so she became unpredictable.
Never try to understand, rather love her.

She gives life. She is a mother.
She makes home. She is a wife.
She is a sister, a savior till the ends.
She is precious because she is a daughter
She refuses to retire because she's born a woman.

And do you feel she deserves just a single day!?

9 | 31 Poems for August 2016

She unapologetically loves each and every crevice of her canvas.
Each part regally resonates to the woman who birthed her.
Each part elegantly exudes the exuberance of its own beauty.
The curves on her body are more than just her dress or jean size.
More than the heads of men which turn as she walks down the street.
Her curves are her heritage – a beautiful sign of where home is.
Through pain she found love and through love she found herself.
We meet in the pages of our story where the ink intimately holds us together.
These words I write become intertwined in the veins of our loving hearts.
In the rain of her presence, my words will always form a rainbow.
I can never get enough of her love; I’m always left yearning for more.
In a world ravaged by cold wars, we both know what we’re fighting for.
She has never spent a day letting the world turn her starry sky into a ceiling.
She wears her crown proudly and embraces the queen that she is.
The curves on her body are more than just her dress or jean size.
More than the whistles which dissipate the silence as she enters the room.
Her curves are her heritage – a beautiful sign of where home is.
The world is my canvas and I hope this African queen will always be my muse.