Floetry From the Heart

It is Enough I was born in the shadows of sinners and saints, where mercy and madness sat side by side, where hymns were sung loud enough to cover the secrets but never loud enough to silence the truth. where in the same pews, sin and righteousness co-exist. I was raised in the house of God, not the spotless kind you see in picture books, but the kind where survival was a prayer, where faith was less about sermons and more about breathing through the storm. The blood on my lips and the dirt on my face that is the relationship I have with God. It is bruised. It is battered. It is not pretty, but it is present. It is not polished, but it is powerful. It’s all the relation I’ve got. And still still I hear the psalmist cry inside me: “The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life, of whom shall I be afraid?” When enemies rose like shadows around me, when betrayal walked through my door, when abandonment slept in my be...

"The Faded Anella Reborn" I. Anella, the dye of blood and birth, poured from the hands of African earth you colored our palms before we knew the meaning of red. Not red like roses. Red like revolution. A deep Red like memory. Brownish Red like the soil that swallowed our names and grew empires on our backs. II. They came with steel-tipped tongues, forked with greed and scripture, branding borders onto our bodies called it map-making, called it salvation, called it progress as if we were standing still. But even then, Anella whispered through the veins of griots and the lullabies of mothers humming futures into infants’ ears. III. Anella faded not gone, just smudged by imperial reign. Whitewashed walls tried to rinse her out with shame, with silence, with colonial ink scrawling “you are not enough” across our history. They thought pigment was power until they saw how deep color runs when it’s soul-born. IV. Anella is a phoenix in silk form— every time they try to bleach her, ...