Scars To Prove It

does healing look like progress a quiet home inside voices children who do not flinch when their name is called perhaps it does but healing is strange because sometimes it doesn’t erase pain sustained under a legal system where the laws were unwritten but somehow universally understood like a constitution that began with "because I said so" that was the gospel according to mother's mine used to say "I’m gon’ beat the black off of you" and though she did not succeed I got the scars to prove she tried to it thundered inside and rained too that threat traveled from the field to the porch from survival to discipline from history to a struggling household environment every black child knew the warnings that need no explanation like the look that look that had ancestry written all over its face the serious look that didn't mess around that looks that put a child in a child's place passed down hand to hand like cast iron skillets recipes traditional Sunday dinners and stories told by those who feared the dark because they knew to be in the house before sundown that kind of love had to be loud enough to cut through flesh to reach us before danger did even if it had to threaten to beat us and did it was a different time and different kind of pain than what scars sustained