To Miss Fannie Lou Hamer

Your road is lit by summer colors
as you carry a ballot and a pen,
ready to be freed by ink
with your signature, a scribbled work
that begins to speak but can only sing.
You fight fists with the force of a hymn.

Crippled by the law, you still wear hymns
on your lips, in your heart. Color
blank minds, teach them to sing
and to place their songs in awaiting pens.
They will listen, remember your words
and learn of the voice of ink.

Before you sketch your life in ink,
it's pictures, memorized like hymns
in the moments when thoughts mean more than words,
when peace means as much as prayer, as color
mixing with color, music finding its pen
so the world can find itself singing.

They cover your mouth but you have to sing,
more than you need paper or ink
while watching doors open, close, open,
taunting you with hard rhythms, breaking your hymns
as they broke your skin once, twice, coloring
you red, flinching at the harshness of their own words.

But you rise from the floor, feeling soft words
grown in your soul, still ready to sing
of the power of standing, the power of colors.
You give every person a bit of your ink,
give them your strength, your endless hymns.
I hum to myself as you fill my pen.

You still grip your ballot and your pen,
"sick and tired of being sick and tired," your words
heard and understood, clear as hymns
breaking through silence. They summers now sing,
their days long, illuminating ink
that speaks of the beauty of all colors.

I want to color my life with your words.
I clutch my pencil and can hear you sing
into my ink, my pages holding your hymns.