You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
’Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
’Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

For my people everywhere singing their slave songs
     repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues 
     and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an
     unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an
     unseen power;

For my people lending their strength to the years, to the 
    gone years and the now years and the maybe years,
    washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending
    hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching
    dragging along never gaining never reaping never
    knowing and never understanding;

For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama
    backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor
    and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking
    and playhouse and concert and store and hair and Miss
    Choomby and company;

For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn 
    to know the reasons why and the answers to and the
    people who and the places where and the days when, in
    memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we
    were black and poor and small and different and nobody
    cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;

For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to
    be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and
    play and drink their wine and religion and success, to
    marry their playmates and bear children and then die
    of consumption and anemia and lynching;

For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox
    Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New
    Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy
    people filling the cabarets and taverns and other
    people’s pockets needing bread and shoes and milk and
    land and money and something—something all our own;

For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time
     being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when
     burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled
     and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures
     who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;

For my people blundering and groping and floundering in
     the dark of churches and schools and clubs and
     societies, associations and councils and committees and 
     conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and
     devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches,
     preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by
     false prophet and holy believer;

For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way
    from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,
    trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,
    all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless
    generations;

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a
    bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second
    generation full of courage issue forth; let a people
    loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of
    healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing
    in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs
    be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now 
    rise and take control.

Our Black bodies, sacred.
Our Black bodies, holy.

Our bodies, our own.
Every smile a protest.
Every laugh a miracle.

Piece by piece we stitch ourselves back together.
This Black girl body
that gets dragged out of school desk, slammed onto floor,
tossed about at pool side, pulled over and pushed onto grass,
arrested, never to return home,
shot on doorsteps, on sofas while sleeping 
and dreaming of our next day.

Our bodies, a quilt that tells the story of the middle passage.
Of roots yanked and replanted.

Our bodies, a mosaic of languages forgotten,
of freedom songs and moaned prayers.

Our bodies no longer
disregarded, objectified, scrutinized.

Our bodies, our own.
Every smile a protest.
Every laugh a miracle.

Our bodies rising. 
Our feet marching, legs dancing, our bellies birthing, hands raising, 
our hearts healing, voices speaking up.

Our bodies.
So Black, so beautiful.

Here, still.
Rising, rising.

Here on the edge of hell

Stands Harlem—

Remembering the old lies, 

The old kicks in the back,

The old "Be patient"

They told us before.

Sure, we remember.

Now when the man at the corner store

Says sugar's gone up another two cents,

And bread one,

And there's a new tax on cigarettes—

We remember the job we never had,

Never could get,

And can't have now

Because we're colored.

So we stand here

On the edge of hell

in Harlem

And look out on the world

And wonder

What we're gonna do

In the face of what

We remember.

What if I tell you they didn’t evacuate

the high school after he brought in the

clock? What if he and clock waited in the

principal’s office

until the police came? You look at me

as though I pulled the fire alarm,

yelled into a crowded theatre. You

think I can erase the weapon out

of the hands of that young man in

Kevlar pointing his assault rifle at me?

Would your pain lessen? Would you

sleep tomorrow? What if I expunge the

hoodie? Outlaw convenience

stores? Institute curfew for all adult males

after 8 p.m.? Did you know that kid

loved horses, ate Skittles, went to

aviation camp? What if

I rub out midnight of the blue, blue

world? Take the jaywalk from the boy

trying to catch a city

bus? Which blue should it be? First or

second? The last thing you hear on the radio

before mashing

another button? What if there were no loosies

to smoke, steal, hawk? What if Sandy used her signal?

I say her name, I canonize the thought all

black lives matter. What if I raise my

voice? What if I don’t stop speaking?

What if I stop talking back?

Then will you miss me?