Something Beautiful

I heard somewhere when I was too young

That beauty is pain. A fact. Nonchalant and laughing:

Beauty is pain

In reference to high heels and the little agony of tweezing and

All the practices to make our natural conform

To silly standards making someone money

From our painstaking self-denigration.

Even as I discard drivel after trammel,

I must concede:

Beauty is pain.

Yes, it is the pain our aunties told us, and

More so the torment bred within us, questions like weeds growing up to choke

The life from our smiles, the confidence from our spirits

Until we rally and remember

How much greater the concept of beauty

Than starving starlets and lines toed just so.

Beauty is what our mothers taught us when their voices soothed

Or when they showed that fearsome strength that

Held the family together. Beauty is what our sisters showed

When they held our breaking hearts in their arms

And told us "you deserve so much better".

You were beautiful when you went through the hardest time

In your life; when you moved heavily, when you were bare

And raw, so scalded you wished you could be stone.

Beauty is a brick house and damn! girl,

You are building it up daily into something indescribable

It takes work to make

Something beautiful