The Frequency of Color: A Poem in Thirty Days. The Frequency of Color: A Poem in Thirty Days.
#napowrimo26
Day 30
I had this title “ The frequency of color” in my head for ages and never got a change to investigate it so this 30/30, I decided to take it on in public, thru the process so that I could get to the guts of it later. Thank you for indulging me.
I wrote this poem for my father as testimony.
As testimony to the body and to the frequency the body holds after the evidence is flooded, after the throat is closed and everyone goes home and calls it resolved.
it is not resolved and we are still here.
—————
I began with a trumpet
I couldn’t name and ended here
in a room where my daughter sleeps,
where the frequency of her breathing
is proof enough that the light got through.
I did not write, the most beautiful poem I have ever heard,
but that everything we bent ourselves through, every prism, every crossing, every wound, every closed door before we reached it, was moving toward this.
This sleeping. This breathing.
This future tense I can touch.�
Enter the frequency.
Burn in the violet.
Don’t mourn the spectrum.
Wrong is not our name.
We are the history that refused to end.
the non regulated pigment
the wavelength that bent through every system, every century, every law
written to make us forget
what we were made of
We be bent.
We be scattered into every color.
We
the daughter sleeping,
the
father writing,
the
grandmother who survived the crossing
and carried the song in her body
to the other shore.
We are still here.
We are still the frequency.
even through all the everything thrown at us
and we still come out singing.
Closing out National Poetry Month like…
The Down Home x messsy collab has been busy! Check out all the featured poets!
@theamonyee@markc_walton@pappatshak@doctordonny@elizabethiannaci@ellynmaybe
So grateful to the brilliant poets who who shared their work this month!
Link in bio.
#NationalPoetryMonth
#poetsofinsta
#Poetry
Frequency of Color: A Poem Over Thirty Days.
#napowrimo26. #tshakacampbellpoet #poetry
Day 29
Once belonging is heard
even briefly, the frequency becomes less precious. and more necessary
something like what’s made daily.
by hands that remember hunger.
The poem stops being precious.
We stop bargaining with inspiration.
we say melanin like it is the technology it is.
we say dark-skinned like it is the beauty it is.
we say all the shades like they are the spectrum they are
we say my daughter’s name
and we mean: the frequency continues.
we mean: what they flooded is still singing.
we mean: the color they tried to erase
is the color she is learning to wear
like the inheritance it is.
You stop waiting for the perfect hour,
the perfect silence,
the perfect self.
Every ancestor I have .
made do with less.
The least I can do is show up
cuz what we make daily from necessity.
we begin to want for our children as knowledge
ordinary miracle
color learning to reveal its abundance.
Frequency of Color: A Poem Over Thirty Days.
#napowrimo26. #tshakacampbellpoet #poetry
Day 28
beauty is in the eye of the beholder they say
and value, when finally seen, is never seen alone.
it requires another face, another gaze,
Our daughter will not learn that color has its own signal
She will learn what the prism does
How ordinary light, once opened, reveals
She will know the difference isn’t danger
That beauty can multiply without breaking apart.
That what looks alone may already be carrying a hundred hidden brilliances.
I want that to be basic knowledge.
To be the yes in a series of I am’s
and that yes
opens like a window in a crowded room
where suddenly a country, a people, a lost name returns to the mouth as belonging to it
and to her.
Frequency of Color: A Poem Over Thirty Days.
#napowrimo26. #tshakacampbellpoet #poetry
Day 27
That sound
that vibration
is a door being opened from the inside
by the person who has been standing there all along, waiting for someone to finally
say their name out loud.
This has me thinking about patience.
how precious gems don’t apologize
for how long they stayed in the ground.
unseen
How it isn’t silence.
How it isn’t surrender.
like Gold doesn’t apologize for being
gold
for being valued
I guess because some things
must be protected before they are recognized
and finally
we realize everything they called nothing and soil
and black and dirt
was gold the whole time.
no?
so…. the problem was never our value
The problem was the eye
Frequency of Color: A Poem Over Thirty Days.
#napowrimo26. #tshakacampbellpoet #poetry
Day 26
Each shade of us a frequency
A frequency. A vibration.
A way of moving through the world
that carries information about where you came from and what the coming from cost
and what survived the cost.
