Welcome to this week’s Poetically Yours. Poetically Yours showcases poems from northern Illinois poets, but this segment features Heather Cleveland from Oakland, California.
Cleveland is a residential interior designer with over 22 years of experience. She studied at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in San Francisco, and is also a member of the International Interior Design Association (IIDA), Northern California Chapter.
Today she shares her poem “An Awaking in Four Seasons.”
The work of a white girl….
Click, Click, Click
The sound of something new, something different.
Her Name? I don’t recall
Her face? Not at all.
Brown skin girl in my all white class
We are all equal, meaning somehow the same
But not this girl, the one with no name.
Her hair was quite thick, with those coils of braids
Braids with those beads with that magical sound
A sound so enchanting, so desirable, I found
Myself full of lust for those braids and those beads
But my fine hair could not hold them, this I could see
So, not the same, but what of the equal?
The answer it seemed, was just round the bend
A new brown girl, who became my best friend
One day during class, while we learned of slave trade
My brown friend was asked to stand and relay
Her family’s history of enslavement
How she felt, what it meant
From deep in my soul rose a white hot anger
I looked in her eyes and saw how it pained her
Humiliation, grief, shock and despair
Right then I knew the deeply unfair
Stain of our history that left us unequal
This searing moment became the prequel
To a road that I chose to speak truth to power
And to refuse to allow racism to devour
One more friend, stranger, or human heart
I had work to do, to know how to start.
Little by Little I found a brave voice
And I used it to question America’s choice
To kneel on the necks of our brown and black kin
To question the continuance of America’s sin
In small groups of whites, a racist remark
An off-color joke, the teller feeling quite smart
With a quivering voice, uncertain at best
I’d declare my discomfort and be told let it rest
Friends grew tired of my ever angry ways
But I felt no need to partake in that play
My words were unpolished my skills quite raw
But my heart felt compelled to call out what I saw
Then, a brown husband, brown boy
Our child was born and I witnessed black joy
With my heart full of love but my head filled with fear
The threat of unequal now felt quite near
No longer abstract, now part of my own
My words weren’t enough, not alone
My instinct to shield my beautiful child
Became my obsession, driving me wild.
How to teach him his worth while keeping him safe
To tell him what measures he had to take
To walk in this world with a head held high
But take certain actions that never had I
Had to consider or to care or to worry
It filled me with sadness and a fiery fury
But, that brown husband had walked that same way
Knew what it felt like and knew what to say
Teaches me balance, to take the long view
Because for him, this story ain’t new
He remains calm and knows what to do
now, each day I learn and grow and commit
To this anti-racist work of which I refuse to quit
- Yvonne Boose is a current corps member for Report for America, an initiative of the GroundTruth Project. It's a national service program that places talented journalists in local newsrooms like WNIJ. You can learn more about Report for America at wnij.org.