When I was a sophomore

I read the most horrible, wonderful book

A black girl had stopped talking,

She would become a poet but

She had stopped talking because

When she was eight she got robbed

of her youth, her virgin heart.



She stopped talking because

The man, her mother's lover,

Did not love her as she loved him

And stole a piece of her girlhood.



But she really stopped talking

Because her uncles took justice

And wrapped it around the neck

of evil and squeezed it dry



But she grew tall, powerful

And found the words to

enrapture us all, even me,

the shortest, whitest most protected

girl around.