They Will Not Hold Me Here

There is a violence
in the way they pretend not to notice.
The way they smile through gritted teeth
as you climb.
The way they weaponize silence
when your name is spoken with reverence.

Even in your absence,
they find a way to reach you—
through memory,
through obligation disguised as guilt,
through the way your hands sometimes shake
when you realize the fight isn’t over,
even now,
even here,
even after you’ve won.

They didn’t raise me.
They buried me in the shallow grave
of their own smallness,
told me the sky was blasphemy,
that ambition was betrayal,
that softness was weakness
unless it was theirs to bruise.

But I—I was born
with something they could not name,
could not nurture,
could not kill.

I carry the marrow-deep knowing
that I was never meant to stay tethered
to the rusting machinery of their dysfunction,
their denial,
their disdain for anything
that dared to grow taller
than the walls they built
to keep themselves contained.

They don’t clap when you bloom.
They stomp the soil.
They spit at your sunlight
and then scheme to pull you back down.

Even now,
even when I rise
with poems like thunder
and love like rebellion,
they try to tether me back
to the version of myself
they could control,
could name,
could diminish.

But I do not belong
to their hunger.
I do not answer
to their ghosts.

The clawing hands
will not hold me here.

They cannot bear the weight
of the woman I’ve become—
the force of her clarity,
the spine of her survival,
the storm of her saying,
No more.

I rise
not just for myself
but for every soul
they tried to silence.

I rise
for the daughters who are done shrinking,
for the women who were told
they were too loud,
too much,
too ambitious,
too everything
but obedient.

I rise
and I carry with me
every quiet girl who grew teeth,
every tired woman who found her voice,
every survivor who now dares
to write her own name in gold.

I do not fly alone.
When I ascend,
I lift others too.
With my words.
With my work.
With the way I walk my talk
on solid ground
and still
make sky from it.

They tried to make me small.

But I am the fire they didn’t see coming.
The wind that won’t stay still.
The monument to everything
they failed to break.

And they—

They will not hold me here.