“I Did”
They talk about Europe like it’s clean.
Pure.
Snow-white DNA, straight lines, straight lies.
But I was here.
I did.
I had Sub-Saharan blood 20,000 years ago, inherited
though Kotias.
Not in a museum, not in a footnote —
In me.
Before the marble gods.
Before the empires.
Before they erased the fire in my bones.
I carried the thread they fear.
The south in the north.
The mother’s breath in frozen ground.
They scraped it out like a stain.
I did.
And now they all walk around
like they invented where they are.
Like their roots didn’t pass through the same dark soil.
Like mine is foreign.
Too black. Too brown. Too much. Too gone.
But I know what I held.
I know what was taken.
I know what ran through me
before they wrapped maps around it and called it shame.
So don’t talk to me about origin.
Don’t tell me who’s native to what.
Don’t talk to me about purity —
because you burned mine out and called it progress.
I did.
And I still do.
Even if you can’t see it.
Even if you pretend it was never there.