Ashe to the Mother © 2002
by Malika Halima Amada (vonetta t. rhodes)
Queen,
did you know that we go back,
300,000 years?
Beyond the recorded beginnings of humanity,
beyond blood, sweat, and tears.
Queen
everyday
celebrate your birthday
you are 300,000 years old today.
Mother of the Universe.
Queen of the Planet Earth.
Mistress to the reasons
of all times
and all seasons.
Queen
you are the One.
Lunar cycle based on your menstruation,
birth to families, villages, and nations.
Lover of the children of Creation.
It was you
who mothered
the forefathers of all Nations.
Queen
you are more than 300,000 years old today.
i close my eyes
and thank the great Blackness when i pray.
i walk with the same strands of DNA
that stay
year after year,
which means in another 300,000 millennia
i will still be here.
They struggle down
to bleach Mother Afrika
if they must,
but my locs are rooted in the ancestor's sacred trust,
that true regalness
lies in the beginning of the Black US,
where my strand is your strand,
but your strand may not be mine,
cuz the Afrikan is in the Diaspora
but also 1 of a kind.
300,000 years of existence Queen!
Cast away the ridiculousness of
alpha-hydroxy
and anti-age creams.
We lived the reality,
we womb the dream,
and carry the throne as antiquity's first Queens.
