Erase Me Not
...you won't.
Erase Me Not
They wanna whitewash walls in the nation’s museum,
Scrub the truth raw like we don’t see ‘em.
Delete our names, our songs, our rise,
Like struggle and brilliance never opened eyes.
You feel it? That theft?
The disrespect?
Trying to rewrite history with a billionaire’s check.
But we are not clay for their trembling hands,
We are mountains of memory that still stand.
Tuskegee airmen, freedom rides,
Black poets, brown builders, side by side.
Indigenous tongues carved into stone,
Asian labor made railroads grown.
Latino sweat in fields that fed,
Queer resistance in colors bled.
Muslim scholars, Jewish cries,
Slavery chains turned battle cries.
And they think they can erase that?
Like we didn’t build where they sat?
No.
Not today.
Not ever.
We are storm and feather.
We are the people who rise together.
This is a call to the dreamers,
The wounded believers,
The tired, the broken, the quiet screamers.
Stand up.
Because silence is a luxury we can’t afford,
When truth is trembling behind museum doors.
We are the mothers who marched in Montgomery,
The children who bled in Soweto’s dawn.
We are ancestors humming under skin,
Waiting for you to carry it on.
Yeah, you.
Don’t say “someone”
You’re the pulse, the drum,
You’re the heartbeat of what must come.
It ain't hopeless -
It’s just hard.
But change never came with a Hallmark card.
It came with fists and pens and art,
With lovers and learners who played their part.
So I speak with fire, but I burn with love
For all of us.
The all of us.
Because oneness isn’t soft, it’s steel.
It’s the power to feel -
To know that a stranger’s pain is mine,
That justice denied is a broken spine.
So don’t despair.
Don't sit and stew.
You are the proof that the many can do
What the greedy few will never undo.
Let them try to erase our names
We’ll paint the skies with them.
Let them strip the books and shame
We’ll live the verses they condemn.
We rise not alone,
We rise as One.
The fight’s not over.
It’s just begun.
copyright Phoenix Blue
