Black Is A Nation Poem by Ponfa Fenan

Let me tell you what they never put in the textbooks—
not the ones they gave us,
not the ones they burned.

Black is not a color.
Black is a race.
Black is not a country.
Black is a nation.

They wrote that we were tribes.
They meant divided.
They wrote that we were colors.
They meant less than.

But a nation is not just a flag.
A nation is that widow sharing a cup of rice.
A nation is a child drinking from any black breast—
because hunger has no surname
and survival has no border.

Black is black.
And always black.
Not two sides of a line.
Not a lighter shade of permission.
Not a footnote in someone else's story.

Black is the first page.
Black is the ink and the hand that holds it.
Black is the breath before the word
and the word after the silence.

Let me tell you what they never put in the textbooks:
They drew maps.
We drew circles.
We counted on each other.

© Fenan Ponfa