A Success at Living.

Decades, I've been here for decades.

Should I have been, has my being here

made any difference.

Me, a mere me.

Purpose, has any been served by such

a mere existence.

Born wrong, wrong gender, wrong color.

Too short to reach my dreams.

Born backwards, destined to go out

of the world the same way I came in.

A cold day for a cold birth, along

with an rodent who each year pokes its

head from the hole of a drenched soul,

reminding you that you are synonymous

with mistake, error, nothing, nobody.

Wearing the birthmark of failure

blemishing the joy a birth should bring.

But, I've been here for decades, yet

have I succeeded in removing myself

from the assigned status as a stain on

motherhood and a strain on society.

Poor I was born, black I was bred,

a mere girl, no eyes of blue, no flaxen

curls.

Still, I'm here, not just surviving,

living no regrets, not in a mansion,

but in the passion of my heart,

refusing to remain stoic to the identity

of one day, to a time when a loveless

coupling came about from a need.

Not in the heat of the moment even.

In a moment of a poverty induced

need for heat.

Even as that unlucky number eight

was rolled and I was deemed a mistake,

an unlucky roll of the dice, I knew.

Even through residue love, trickled down

affections, leftovers and do overs, I knew.

I was born a mistake, but I reign as a power.

A force, one that existed to resonate not

how I was born, but how I chose to live.

Decades, I have lived the mistake of

when I was born, but I was born,

so I became the product of my right

to live, to dream, to reach for the stars.

I now stand on the clouds of my existence,

and the rodent and I predict the warm

seasons of many more decades of memories

and captured dreams, maybe still a mistake

at birth, but a success at living.

Marjorie Joyce Leslie

01/28/09