feeling disconnected...

It's one of those days and I have just read something that sums up how I sometimes feel... Is it sad that I am glad not to be the only one that has ever felt this way??? Wish I could walk away from it all... Perhaps this is a poem I will share with my future students. 

Black girls learn to love hard
By Ras Baraka

Black girls learn to love hard
Concrete love
An in spite of love
Even though love
An
In between crying love
They learn love hard.

They rush to grade school dodging whistles
And lewd stares from passing cars of men on their way
to work
They learn vulgarities as compliments
They pretend to get used to being touched when they
don’t want to be
And get attention because they are pretty…

Everyone wants to feel them
Press up on them
Rub against them
Throw them down
Cuss them
Smack them
Penetrate them
Out of love
A be strong love
A hard love to swallow

Young girls sit on stoops and porches
In beauty parlor conversations
Watching their older sisters
With black eyes and bruised self-worth
Learning to be second
And how to hate men and love them all in the same
sentence
They whisper about the women that found love in their
sister’s arms
But secretly wonder how it feels.

Some girls watch their mothers get beat before
breakfast
And get a ride to school quietly in their boyfriend’s
car/
In their name
They carry his drugs
Hold his weapons in their purses
Do time in jail
Fight other girls over our indiscretions
They love hard

Some girls learn to be alone
Some fall in love with crack or wine
And strain their withered brown bodies across
The hood
Like a forgotten dream

Some girls met love in the dark while they were still
vulnerable and small
From a familiar hand in a place they knew
Before they were even virgins
Shaking with terror and confusion
They know love as fear
Something they did to themselves
Love can’t be trusted/its ugly and happens to you when
your back is turned
Love is too hard

No one remembers that they used to be beautiful
Or smart
Or someone’s daughter
Someone’s sister/friend/ a human being

They don’t get to be sweet or gentle
Or cared for
They have to do it alone
No help
Always strong/black women so strong
Bear the burden
No time to breakdown
Or rest
Or be tired
No time for pain or tears
Building strong black families
In communities that are tearing apart at the seams
And its always his momma’s fault
Because they say it starts in the home
But no one is ever there
Mommas somewhere pretending to be strong

Black girls learn love hard
They learn sex as dialogue
The reason /their worth/ best thing they have to offer
And some start talking at a very young age
They got a Ill na na

We all pray for boy babies
But settle for girls
They learn quick
And grow old fast
Soon they pray for boys too.

Black girls learn to love hard
A concrete love
An in spite of love
An even though love
An in between crying love
They learn love hard.

http://mooreblackpress.com/poems_ras_1.html

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