A Colored Girl's Song

Ain't nothing like the tears a colored girl sheds.
Ain't nothing like being three-fifths a man when you ain't one, searching for your fraction to call home. Your borrow to nestle into and be comforted by the affirmations that you are at least something.

Not one thing saltier than the rivers we flow. Than the rivers we drown in daily. Than the very streams we fill to the brim, but ain't nobody searching for colored girls. We're shh'd into midnight stories as fable as black superwoman. When we go missing, don't nobody lift a finger. Don't nobody call the police. They ain't listening no ways, 'specially not for no brown girl body.

We ain't bodies. Bodies ain't ours.

We enter rooms by invitation. Cook your meals. Clean your home, but where's a colored girls home?
Where we sing?
Where we dance, and shout, and praise?
Where we human? Where we home?
Colored girls ain't got no home. Only too deep skin. Only flesh far too resembling of blood and night.

Tonight we stand colored girls. We link like chains, and we be woman as much as we be colored and we be colored as much as we be woman.

 Don't you make us choose which fence we straddle on today. We spent far too much time with our legs shoved open. Who built them through our backs in the first place?
Our backs been bent for years.
Grandma ain't never stood straight.
We kneel to let you get a better seat.

How life look from up there?

Colored girls ain't seen life head on. Only pain and sorrow. Only the soles of boots knocking our faces in.

And we keep passing down this same colored girl blues. We sing it without knowing.
How I learn this song?
How the words morph into my skin like tattoos?
How they taste like home already?
How my mouth already taped shut?
I barely had the chance to use it, but I use it now.

We spit color into your ears. Pray it rings like fight and stings like fire.
Colored girls know fire. We been the first ones to feel his burns. And we burn. We been burnt.
Had fire extinguishers blown through our souls.
We immune now. Try again.
We the toughest things you'd ever wish to get rid of.

But here we are.
Colored girls.
Singing our colored girl blues. Crying our colored girl tears.
Knowing this life ain't meant to cradle souls like ours. Flesh like ours.
But we be here, anyhow.
We be colored, anyhow.

You've tried for centuries to blow us away. But we be colored trees.
Roots planted so deep and you can't see pass the soil.
We be brown and black. And yellow and red.
And all the colors of all the rainbows.

And you just can't silence a colored girl's song.