I am the broken bird wing healer.

For those of you who don't know me allow me to tell you my story.
It is not one that can be confined to pages those ink print cages can't imprison my words,
The stories I have to tell you are not so simple.
If you can remember those ghastly photos of segregation in the 1950's then superimpose that image 50 years forward and it's not a pretty picture.
But to prematurely pronounce racism as passed away
While my childhood passed away
Every single day, looked in the eyes and called a nigger,
In a class full of white 6 year olds who didn't understand their privilege.
Well then you must have been looking at the world with one eye closed.
In kindergarten I first learned what it was to be looked at like a splotch of dirt on your Sunday's best.
See, I got to experience integration first hand, in 2005,
Which you'd think would be a good time for a black man to be alive,
But for a black boy in a Catholic school, being the only black student in class did not make me equal,
It made me a target.
Everyday was a new struggle.
Getting in trouble for fights that I didn't start,
Letters home because I was a genius I just wasn't smart
And broken hearts because light girls didn't want a "brownie like me."
Well you can imagine what that did for my self-esteem.
Making me believe as if being white was the only way to be happy.
So for the next 6 years I was "a freak" to myself at least.

Then I was lost.

Then I was found.

I guess I fixed my own broken wings and flew away to a place that was happier than my old reality.
But once you find your wings, others are drawn to your magnificence,
And after years of feeling my feathers plucked out and contorted by hatred,
Who was I to refuse.
Broken birds bring broken hearts and broken bodies,
And my formerly broken self tries to help them find their wings.

I am not perfect.

Sometimes I stumble

And sometimes I plummet

Sometimes I have to pace around my backyard for hours under sunrises and sunsets penning down memoirs through poetry to remind myself,
That a beginning may be beautiful,
But an amaranthine tinted sky with a tired ball of luminescence deciding to retire for the night
Will always have my heart.
For something so beautiful to occur, for such a gorgeous end result to even start,
You have to have your sunrise.
So rise child,
For you
Are
A
Star,
And your brightest days are yet to come.
Take in those with broken wings, so that you too can fly