I know that I have not felt whole since

Toni Morrison died.

I realized the fragility of my own existence

once I saw greatness pass.

For the first time in my life, I’d mourned

a mentor whom I never knew.

But I did know;

just as strongly as I’d

known my hands to flow across

paper and leave a crime scene,

just as sure as words after they’ve

already been said.

I gave my tears and yelps, and gasps back

to the woman whose pages once grasped them all.

The woman who took my powerlessness

and turned it into wonder, whose stories felt like spirituals

that bent my back and healed my wounds and made me pray,

whose words made me feel on days when I swore, I’d never feel again.

Words that only broke my heart to piece it back together

so much lighter than it once was,

helped me cut loose the thing that weighed me down the most.

Words that inspired and produced aspiring;

forced me to demand a legend out of my own damn self.

Words that came as a language, ready to be unpacked.

I believe she wrote for the writer I will become.