In her beautiful poem, Ancestral Intelligence, CJ Spears evokes a deeper intelligence rooted in the body, in community, and in a sacred inheritance carried forward across rupture. Cultivated through kinship, survival, and reciprocity, this intelligence arises from a living continuum of memory, land, spirit, and collective responsibility. Spears’s poem insists that “we are the way forward / we are the way back,” reminding us that the futures we seek may depend on what our ancestors have already taught us to remember.
There is something ancient rooted in your heart.
A whisper in a flame that knows your full name, and why
A presence that prevails beyond passing
praying. shifting. storytelling. persisting.
There lives a wisdom in the hot, harmattan winds
carrying tradition and truth
across artificial borders and separated relatives
boldly burning the sky orange.
There is an ocean of Black blood behind every iphone and television screen
an army of ancestors screaming silently
into a world full of noise
There is a galaxy
of symbiotic proverbs
portaled through the North Star
into patterns and cycles
our descendants were born to inherit
And if we borrow the Earth from our children,
If I am only because we are then
what are we?
We are each others answer and armor
the solutions that no machine can calculate
the sacred exception that crashes algorhythms
just to build them back up again
we are the minerals and the mines
the elders song traveling its way up our spines
the lush green forest manifesting a deep breath for intoxicated lungs
the sand and the spice and the full moon merging into one
we are the way forward
we are the way back
we are the way forward
we are the way back
we are the way forward
we are the way back
There is a compass in your spirit
infinitely spinning
to remind you of that.
CJ Spears—Chasejamison Akilah Manar-Spears—is a writer, reader, and yoga teacher whose work dwells “where stillness and stories meet.” Read more of her work through her Substack, CJ Spears. The poem was inspired by ancestors and by the creative-writing work Spears undertook with middle-school students at EOYDC.
