The Myth of the Strong Black Woman
Wounded and tainted...
Formed by change.
Why is it so wrong to drop tears before they reach the back of her hand?
She is cemented in pain...
And offered no foundation to withstand...
She creates waves of emotion like those crashing over the most tormented of sands..
And yet again...
She is always taught to be...
Poised and collected
Harboring masks of pain formed under her own hypocrisy...
Withering under yet... another society’s plea.
For she succumbs to the idealism of what it truly means to be called “weak.”
.
.
.
.
.
She walks in lands of those familiar spaces...
Yet none of them feel like her own...
She dances eyes with those “family” faces
Yet no one cites to her that “this is home”..
Continuously Defying... and somehow defining...
What is means to truly be called “alone”...
Because she rents out those tendencies that offer no foundation for a place to plant roots for a home..
Yet this is the space that we tell her...
Here... “she must belong”.
The depths of her destiny is created...
In the infamous landings of her surroundings..
So hell bent on not being seen as “Jaded”
Relentlessly “Failing forward” and breathlessly drowning.
Underneath this potion of society’s ocean..
That tells her to live within the spectrum of an unobtainable notion..
A “Black Wonder Woman”
Yes... Should she be?
That compels her to question
Is she truly “Built to last”?
Or “clothed in strength and dignity”
For now she must understand the consequences that come with being labeled a dear “young black queen”
For, she is now forced to see...
That the pain must follow the birth...
When she steps out the realm of their wants...
And conceives the form of her own “Powerful. Black. Identity.”
