Black People (America is Just Not That Into You)
Posted on May 14, 2013 Leave a Comment
Black People, Black People
the verdict will never be in your favor
Please
no more marches
no more petitions
no more sit-ins
America is just not that into you.
You shall not overcome
let hope die a merciful death
Black President?
You thought that was love?
Ask yourself, are you better off in 2013,
than you were in 2008?
America never has and never will love you.
America is happy to let you entertain her,
Run Nigga Run
Dunk Nigga Dunk
Sing Nigga Sing
Dance Nigga Dance
Is Stop and Frisk Love?
Does America love you?
Go ask Emmit Till
Malcolm X
Medgar Evers
Amadou Diallo
Go ask Trayvon Martin.
You think America loves you,
because you get to stand in Paris
Rapping about Niggas in Paris,
while Gywneth bobs her blond head on stage?
You think America is post-racial,
You think Hip-Hop has changed the world.
From the sixteenth to the twenty-first century,
America has enslaved you, lynched you, segregated you,
incarcerated you, divided and conquered you.
America will never love you.
Take your talents, some place further than South Beach,
the American dream was never meant for you.
Always separate, never equal.
La femme de couleur
Posted on February 26, 2013 Leave a Comment
Borrowed mother’s voice,
To pay tribute.
My aria ricochets.
Have the dark clouds been banished?
Are you dreaming of delicious blackberries?
Has my song ransomed me?
A dutiful daughter,
I am a parody of an echo.
These legacy chains bind me,
silken sisterly knots,
stirring soup in cast iron pots
to feed the ‘strongmen, as they keep coming.’
Merely, a ‘mule of the world’
constructed by colonial circumstance
laboring, loving, enduring and dreaming.
Copyright by Sherley Jean-Pierre
Autobiography of a Goddess
Posted on February 26, 2013 Leave a Comment
Autobiography of a Goddess
Emerging
from the head of a god?
fully formed from the sea?
No, falling
from a Cap-Haïtien mango tree
a suckling, nourishing on sugarcane.
Departing,
same hemisphere, new city.
an undocumented body
in the elementary factory
assembly line.
Discovering language
weaving tales like Scheherazade
not to defer death
but to invent myself.
Divine, gifted and black
Walking,
through a metropolitan labyrinth
searching for my matrilineal lineage.
Exhausted,
from the fruitless, quixotic attempts
to distill segments of my soul
to bottle the darkness.
Have you ever seen a goddess weep?
Jackie O shades, Conceal.
Even a goddess’s heart can be broken.
Possessed
Of all my powers
to conceive, to nurture, to weep
to think, to love, to forgive
to be detached—self-actualized
to accept being both the sheep
and the wolf.
Determined, gifted and black
there is a room for me
in the ivory tower.
Cognizant,
that hubris
is my constant companion.
Awaiting the classic end.
copyright by Sherley Jean-Pierre
iamsherleyfierce 