Poem-of-the-Week: Toni Asante Lightfoot

What The Liberal White Women Didn’t Know

If you came to see Moms put your clothes in the hamper
If you won’t do that then you best well scamper
Moms Mabley at the Michigan Womyn’s Festival

Look a here. I know why they called me.
Looking for a little dark meat like all White folk.

They didn’t know I old enough to come like I come.
Brought my “All Girl Nudey Review”.

A few Steinem types showed up at my trailer fence.
They was well meaning. Probably to tell me some shit

I wasn’t gonna listen to no how.

They wouldn’t come naked

so they left with their words
tucked neatly inside their pursed lips.

When I got on stage was like crickets
was the only ones in audience.

They didn’t know I got up in the funny
bone of harder company.

Sho nuf by the time I crossed the stage twice
them women was putting up their hands

either in joy
or testimony.


-Toni Asante Lightfoot



Toni Asante Lightfoot is a poet, teacher, performer, and activist. Born and raised in Washington, DC, she started hosting poetry readings in 1993 at Soul Brothers Pizza and moved to It's Your Mug in early 1994, where it hosted Saul Williams, Willie Perdomo, Miguel Algarin, The Darkroom Collective from Boston, Rhoma Spencer of Trinidad & Tobago and some of the best poets in DC. She is living in exile in Chicago, Illinois. She first left DC in 2000 to be artistic director of The Haven, an artistic retreat and bed & breakfast in Trinidad & Tobago. From there she joined the Blackout Arts Collective of Boston and became their artistic director in 2002. After realizing Boston what not her cup of tea, she packed up a truck and headed west to the Third Coast. Chicago has been a home sometimes cold, sometimes hot, but full of opportunism. Lightfoot is now the Director of TEACH Program at Young Chicago Authors. www.myspace.com/toniasantelightfoot

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Lightfoot will be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 10-13, 2010, in Washington, DC. The festival will present readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programming, film, activism—four days of creative transformation as we imagine a way forward, hone our community and activist skills, and celebrate the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for social change. For more information: info@splitthisrock.org.

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