They told us be small
so we learned how to take up space in silence
until silence broke. They told us
wait but time was never neutral,
so we turned waiting into marching, into shouting,
into history that would not sit still.
We are the daughters of denied names, of stolen credit, of hands that built empires and were never allowed to sign them. We are the echo that refused to fade. From the ashes of every “no,” we forged a louder answer not pretty, not polite, but powerful enough
to shake the spine of the world.
We are not just stories in textbooks, we are the ink they tried to run dry.
We are not just progress, we are pressure, we are persistence,
We are proof that resistance breathes.
Rhoda Nills
Greenfield