When I See Stacey

When I See Stacey

by Ernie McCray

When I see Stacey
I feel pride
for my people’s history,
for how we
journeyed across the sea,
packed like spoons,
between the holds
and decks of slave ships,
shackled,
starving,
suffocating
in our very misery,
snatched from Mother Africa,
our homeland,
like the cotton
we would pick
in the Americas,
on the first leg
of a rocky path
to an as yet still undisclosed
destiny.

When I see Stacey
I see a woman
of keen vision
who has re-established
the connection we need
with our beginnings,
bringing it to shine on us
like the once familiar rays
of our homelands’
life-giving suns,
a woman
tending to our needs
like a lioness
protecting her little ones,
teaching us how to be both
wary
and cunning,
how to hold our own
and take our licks
and hang on,
to concede nothing
if what we’re facing
is riddled with wrongs,
and when I see her
I hear the rhythms
of djembe
and udu drums,
the mellow tones
of the mbira
being thumbed,
the strumming
of akotings
and koras
as verses
and choruses
are being sung
in tongues
we once knew
and I want to dance
in the joy
of just seeing Stacey
give credence
to our dreams
of truth and reconciliation
and retribution
for the centuries
of our subjugation
to a form of dehumanization
that has deprived our nation
of evolving into
the model civilization
the world needs it to become.

When I see Stacey
I see
a modern day
human rights icon
who represents the hope
that such a day
of contrition
will eventually come,
that we shall,
someday,
truly overcome.