In pre-k I was taught to count to ten in Creole before I ever knew the word English.

The native tongue of the forgotten in America, was instilled into my lips.

Now I trace those words out onto my skin,

Branding this white flesh as unforgiven.

How can I forgive the oppression my ancestors lashed into the backs of others,

Breaking bones with whips and spurs, 

In my blood lies Native Americans, disease ridden by Europeans who forces procreation,

Within the innocents in my tribes, I lay

Above the tombstones Of lost family.

I speak to the earth as if she is planted in my heels,

Feel her giving power flow and heal,

A gentle roots raised in my tendons,

Each step moving with them.

My skin has grown over the flesh of the African American,

The one bearing my double great grandmother on the plantation,

My melanin rejecting the truth of affairs,

As layers and layers of my ancestors,

Grow in graveyards of earth.

I first learned to count to ten in Creole, and

How to say greetings and be polite without knowing the punishing past inflicted by Caucasians.

My father told me he didn’t care about other languages taught to me

That he would carve English into my mouth, over the words of another country.

How similar we still behave

Taking what was never ours to begin with, claiming

The bodies of others to fit our ideas of perfection,

Which some how equals Caucasian,

Means I can’t know other languages, 

or love someone who doesn’t look like them.

It is continuously burned into children,

Before they ever reach kindergarten.