Dear Phillis Wheatley

Before ink knew my name

you bent language into prayer

A black girl taught to read

between captivity and God,

between the weight of chains

and the roar of heaven

Phillis,

they dressed you in obedience

and called it grace

They tested your mind like a novelty

paraded your brilliance

as proof you were human

as if your breath had not already declared it.

You wrote anyway.

You reached for virtue not as submission,

but as survival,

as a compass,

as a way to keep your soul intact

while the world tried to borrow it without consent

“Attend me, Virtue, thro’ my youthful years! O leave me not to the false joys of time!”

I hear that line now

from your ingenious verse

lighting the fire in my fingers

to type like

Tomorrow has no home

I relate as a quiet rebellion

You were a young black girl asking

to be guarded from illusions,

from borrowed pleasures,

from destinies not her own

They praised your faith

but ignored your fire

They framed your poems

but not your pain

Still, your words slipped through history

like keys hidden in hymns

You remind us, Phillis,

that black women have always been

intellectual before they were allowed,

spiritual before they were believed,

and poets before they were free!

Your youth was watched.

Your genius was questioned.

Your body was owned.

But your imagination was never enslaved.

Today, we write louder

because you wrote first.

We claim joy with a pen

virtue with choice,

and time on our own terms.

Your pen did not ask permission.

It asked eternity to listen.

And it still does.

---