You are beautiful; no matter what they say.

‘Cause words can’t bring you down...

But they can.

And they have.

See, we’ve got these things in our lives that we call a mirror.

It paints a perfect picture & that image is clearer

But the media of lies tries to play tricks on your eyes

Whispering in your ear that you’re too, too...

Too dark, too short, too ugly, or you laugh too loud.

You’re too angry, too independent, and have too much ass...sets

But you’re just too naïve....

To know your actual worth...like they do.

Because the sooner they get you to believe

they will deceive...

You and you’ll never be free

Ergo let them wonder about your genes that you wear just fine.

So be too dark,

Queen, you make the sky so jealous

because your skin is reminiscent of every beauty ever known.

Like the color of the ink that lines pages,

or the African soil that raises men to be kings and the pyramids to whisper to the heavens.

Maybe you do laugh loud,

But there’s something about how even then the moon gets insecure.

Probably because the curve of your lips mocks her crescent shape

or the way that you steal her light only to have them dancing off of your teeth

Your laughter is an assemblage of the colors of the sky right before the sun rises,

An echo of galaxies unborn produced from your chords

Tell them that you have every damn right to be angry.

I’ve seen you torn in two and crucified.

Being hung on billboards, visually impaled by men with eyes of nails.

They continue to make a martyr of your culture with no vindication when all you need to hear is “I’m sorry”...

Sorry for the music videos,

Sorry for every skin-bleached woman that grazes the cover of any magazine

for the ignorance of Don Imus and those alike.

And for the men throughout your life whose stares make you want to shed your flesh and disappear

If I could, I’d show them all a picture of Phylicia Rashad, Dorothy Dandridge, and Sade.

Of Assata Shakur, Diana Ross, Lauryn Hill, Cicely Tyson, and Alek Wek

Of your mother, my mother my great-great gran and my 10 year old niece with incendiary bomb eyes.

I’d dare them to say that darker skinned girls,

That black girls,

That black women,

That YOU...

Are, not, beautiful.

Creature of perfection

Pure African beauty.