Daughter of the Village

Somewhere she still stands,
beautiful as the day God designed her,
Innocent as the fabric he used to construct her heart and spirit.
Try to remember that smile
the secret portal to purity
and those eyes that made approaching days more desirable.
Somewhere she is still preserved in a freeze frame, void of attacks on her soul.
Before clouds suffocated each individual sunray and doused the sun with unholy water.
She is paused,
Right there,
with majestic wings that float her inches above the toxic soil
and I used to hope she would never plant her feet in this earth because I hate to watch flowers die.

I pray for a stronger mind to recall her frown proof face more vividly
it was the medicine
and her laughter was our religion.
It might sound foolish to those who only understand destruction and confusion,
but to us,
this daughter of the village was our antenna to the Creator.

We were to protect her,
Don our war paint and battle dress and sacrifice our own heartbeats and breath for her,
We were to construct an atmosphere where double dutch routines were the extent of complexities
And tea parties weren’t social experiments with convoluted case studies and predatory registries.


Why do we kill love and breed hate?
And why do we capture butterflies but feed snakes?
And why couldn’t we keep her precious,
Keep her from men with mental death projectiles extending from their abdomen and wrists,
exploding with bursts of anti-estrogen chemicals and shrapnel
severing her physical self from the utopia designed to highlight the high points of life.

She is left shadow boxing against trauma, and hoping to escape flashbacks of the neighbor’s fingerprints that spin against her skin and turn into monsters.
And even through the mental lacerations and bruises she still remembers that she is the daughter of the village.
And even if we don’t protect her for her, she will protect us.
It’s a damn shame that little girls have to carry the burdens and secrets of the village in their hearts and grow up to forgive those who never have to forgive them.
They are asked to dig deeper and go through wars as solo soldiers.
Lock their tears away and wash the stench of their enemy from their sacred temples.
Stand up and breast-feed the future.
Wipe away life’s most wretched memories with one sweeping thought
and just get over it.
Just get over the emotional injuries caused by greedy grown man hands and angel piercing penises thrashing through bodies like tribal raids after dawn.
Forget about stepfathers and uncles climbing under unicorn covers and knocking stuffed animals to the ground to make room for the sickness.
Forget about Fathers and cousins fondling Gods beautiful light out of her wonderful glowing existence.

They say it takes a village to raise a child, and I do believe that.
But if that’s true, then my question is,
Why the hell do we love to destroy them?


By: Omari “King Wise” Barksdale
June 2007