It’s Not New for Us.
We've Always Had to Bloom Anyhow
I am posting about birds today because I am taking a brief rest from the many assaults I/we face daily. When people say, “You are so good at finding the positives,” I want to ask: what part of incurable cancer do you not understand? I am not finding positives—I am finding my lifelines. Just as the generations before me had to do. Bloom Anyhow is a derivation of the gospel song Hallelujah Anyhow.
People offer backhanded compliments because they are angry at me/us for finding ways to navigate these minefields of hate and systemic injustice
.
I have always been burdened by what this country has been doing. This is not a new awakening for me or for us.
I was born the day before Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his I Have a Dream speech. On my birth certificate, my race was categorized as: Negroid.
I was one of the first beneficiaries of Head Start. That program, a well-meaning program who knew we were financially behind. A program that fed me and my siblings as well as gave us enrichment programs.
What it did not name but what we have always known—what this country rarely names—is that this condition was not accidental. It was systemic.
Ask my people.
My parents.
My parents’ parents.
And the ones before them.
We were born into this.
I first chose counseling as a profession, believing I could help heal what was broken. Later, I chose poetry. Poetry gave me another way to navigate injustice—a language vast enough to hold grief, memory, resistance, and vision all at once.
Some days that looks like testimony.
Some days that looks like rest.
And today, it looks like birds.
Amber shouts: Cardinal Alert. Cardinal in the snow alert. She knows I love birds.
Because blooming anyhow does not always roar.
Sometimes it sings.
For a seer, poetry allowed me to report my way of being. I saw the world, but I also saw what was between the worlds. My work has always been trying to investigate this marginal living.
Some people are now just waking up to the way it has always been. When privileges are being stripped away. Now, it will be up to them to build fortitude that we have had to build.
Here is a poem I wrote for Harriet E. Wilson, an African-American novelist. She was the first African American to publish a novel in North America. Her novel Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black was published anonymously in 1859 in Boston, Massachusetts. It was fitting in the 1800s. Fitting now in 2026. It really is an Ars Poetica poem.
Sketch
For Harriet E. Wilson
With a determined hand, write the wrong.
Right it! Press your free hand upon parchment.
Spill ink like night clouds
that clot what your soul cannot hold.
Catch what history hurls.
Double your fist in defiance,
unfurl your world into long lines, but
fet straight to the point:
Pen every deed. Record the heavy dreams
that woke you each morning.
Press down. The paper can bear your weight.
Make the page speak of back break,
the quill quiver with nothing less than the meat of it.
Whip the naked flesh of the past like you were slashed.
Bleed deep – gash history,
even if it must stand on hobbled legs.
Draw the face, so we may stare
at the rotten teeth truth.
Give yourself a pristine mouth
to say your piece, a doorway
into a home on history’s page,
where you’re not hemmed in at the margins.
Don’t beg or bow.
Stand in your place.
Ink firm your existence out of the shadows.
Make history one deliberate letter at a time
--not as a slave,
but not fully free either.
Write it the best you can.
Press your free hand on your heart.
Unbind your mind no matter
how the hand wavers.
This is how perfect penmanship feels:
One liberated turn after the other.
Script your destiny. Weave the story.
Right the sky. Burn through fog, mist and muck.
Free your eyes. Sketch a new horizon.
Pulled and drawn by your own hand.
So many people have tried to silence me along the way.
Telling me what I experienced was in the past.
As if trauma has a calendar.
As if harm expires.
All the while, they had no idea of the daily assaults—
the small cuts, the constant negotiations,
the way the air itself can feel like opposition.
Worse still, they could not see
that their presence,
their disbelief,
their comfort,
their refusal to listen—
was part of the assault.
You cannot erase someone’s lived reality
and call it peace.
You cannot dismiss testimony
and still claim innocence.
I have not imagined this.
I have survived it.
And I am still here.
Still speaking.
Still bearing witness.
May you continue to build your your skills on how to Bloom Anyhow! It is not a luxury, but a necessity.
Powerful words!