For Every Thread I Carry

I am not one thing.

I never was.

I am not a pure page from a pedigree book

nor a single verse sung in only one tongue.

I am footnotes and fire,

torn maps and salt.

I am the story no census could hold.

Born of traded hands

and torn treaties

of women sent not with choice

but with orders.

"Daughters of the King,"

they called them,

sent to marry men in wild, breaking lands

they’d never dreamed of.

Women who wept into unfamiliar soil

and bore nations in silence.

I carry them.

And I carry the ones

who were chained..

not by choice,

but by greed.

Brought to sweat and survive

in cane fields and kitchens,

in shadows and swamps,

until breath became rebellion.

From their ache, I rose.

From their hymns hummed under breath,

their backs unbowed in secret,

their love passed hand to hand like sweetroot in famine..

I am made.

I am Indigenous too..

Lenape, Manahoac, Haudenosaunee.

Taught not through bloodlines on paper,

but through the eyes of my grandfather

who walked with earthbound truth.

Who taught me balance,

without needing to name it.

His silence was a kind of ceremony.

His knowing, a shelter

when nothing else in life was safe.

And I am Scots.

Truth-bound.

Rough-voiced and relentless.

I know how to stand in a storm and not flinch.

That fire lives in me still..

in my spine,

in my refusal to lie down when the world says “yield.”

And yes... Welsh.

Sea-cloaked and slate-eyed,

with songs passed down in bone

instead of sound.

A longing for valleys I’ve never seen

but feel in the curve of my grief.

Poetry is not a craft—it is an instinct,

a blood memory I’ve never needed to learn

because it has always been mine.

And then there’s the red earth of exile..

Cajun, Creole, Mediterranean, Portuguese.

Names scattered by empire,

tongues that twist salt and sugar together.

I carry spice like history,

and wear pale skin like contradiction.

You want to know who I am?

I am a girl who should have been broken

by what men took,

by what family silenced,

by what society ignored.

I was offered to others

by the men who should’ve protected me,

taught to hold my voice like a sin in my throat.

I learned silence in languages no child should know.

And yet...

I still spoke.

Even if no one heard it,

I spoke.

I am the child who watched her innocence stolen

and somehow still bloomed.

I am the teenager with trauma etched

like tally marks beneath the skin

and I still found softness.

I am the woman

who held grief,

rage,

shame,

and sacredness

all in the same breath.

I have screamed.

I have waited.

I have trembled in quiet rooms

and walked out with my head high.

Not unscarred.

But unyielding.

I have survived chronic illness,

hunger,

loneliness,

and the cruel weight of remembering..

and still,

I mother.

I create.

I believe.

I laugh!

Yes..

despite it all,

I still laugh.

I am deaf but I hear the world more clearly now.

Not in sound,

but in truth.

In spirit.

In weight.

I am not trying to rise.

I already have.

Over and over and over again.

I am the rope and the hand that climbs it.

I am not reaching for approval..

I am reaching for legacy.

Let them say what they want

about blood,

about who belongs.

I belong to those who endured.

I belong to the land that held them

when no one else would.

I am what’s left

when history runs out of ink

but the body keeps remembering.

I am not just the product

of what was taken,

but of what refused to be destroyed.

I am the country they tried to unmake.

And I am still here..

braided, burning,

beautiful

and completely

mine.