Echoes Beyond the Chains

You know what’s sad—
Most of us wander,
Carrying names not our own,
Stories rewritten in foreign tongues,
Echoes of kings and queens
Buried beneath the weight of chains.

We look in the mirror
And see only what they want us to see:
A history clipped,
A spirit tamed,
Dreams rewritten by colonial hands
That taught us to forget
The drumbeat of our ancestors,
The meaning of our own skin.

But somewhere,
Beneath the surface,
A memory stirs—
A song that refuses to die,
A truth that whispers
We are more than what was forced upon us.
We are the children of sun and soil,
Of rivers and wisdom,
Of laughter that survived the lash.

So let us remember—
Not just the pain,
But the power.
Let us search for ourselves
In the stories untold,
In the names unspoken,
In the pride that rises
When we dare to ask:
Who were we,
Before they told us who to be?

#blackpoetry #blackheritage #blaqsbii