Tomorrow's Daughters Poem by Lebogang Mashile

I want to write a poem
About pretty black girls
Who don't relax and lie their dreams away
Voices that curl
The straight edges of history
Hair thin slices of a movement
Turning the world kinky
I respect the disciplined silent screamers
Who expose the holes
Emily Dickinson, I am climbing through
To your wooden shed of isolation
Where the robin's song
Robbed you of your sanity
I revere people to my own detriment
Perhaps you did too
But when I enter your hallowed hearth
Please don't turn me away
I want to show pretty black girls
How to look at their hearts
With eyes blaring at full blast
The way you did
Together we can build a bridge
To the promise in their faces
And pull them towards poems
By pretty black girls
Wearing crowns of change