To my future daughter

The 3rd generation of first born daughters

You were born a Maga’ Haga 

You carry the lineage of women who broke their back breaking glass ceilings 

You will inherit the softness to speak when silence would be easier,
to walk away from what you love
when it no longer loves you back.

You will carry the gentleness to stand your ground
like waves carving into limestone,
firm without fury,
steady even when the world tells you to bend.

But before you 

There was me

a girl raised on papaya soap and borrowed dreams.

Bleached to fit a beauty 

I never chose but learned to chase 

I was taught to dream in ivory and cream

I swallowed the lie

that if I just tried hard enough

Paid my pound of flesh to fit in then 

the American dream could belong to brown girls like me
But I was tired of borrowing dreams that didn’t see me as beautiful 

I had to learn that darkness was not the absence of creation

But the origin

A reminder of where God came from 

I taught myself to strip their lies from my skin

before I could wrap you in truth.

You were never meant to dissolve into colonial concrete 

But to crack their foreign foundations

Until our roots can reclaim what was buried

Maga’ Hagas 

Were never ashamed of the shadows living in their skin 

Like guagua’ and kottot dried in the sun 

lemmai , nikyok, suni, culture, history, family 

They carried our people through generations of genocide 

And they are still there 

printed in the pigment of your skin like memory 

With every breath their names are called 

You will not be swallowed by silence.

You are the voice carved

from the ribcage of women

who dared to sing in the dark.

Their stories echo in you bones 

I pray that one day you will know what it means to build 

without first having to break 

To weave dreams strong enough to be soft, to be gentle, to be unapologetically brown and beautiful.