(upbeat music) - My name is Sojourner Ahebee, a heavy I'm 25 years old, and I'm a poet.

I was born in Cote d'Ivoire West Africa.

And I moved here when I was about seven.

I guess, as a poet, I really began writing poetry as a direct result of leaving Cote d'Ivoire.

And so I kind of went into poetry trying to explore some of those things about like leaving home, being from two nations.

My like really early journals were essentially these like recordings of like what different rooms in my house looked like.

Things I didn't want to forget about my home in Cote d'Ivoire, people I didn't want to forget.

And then that slowly became a practice of poetry.

My mom's a poet and she would read the poems and Laila bedtime stories.

Did share poems by like Maya Angelo and Langston Hughes.

And I kind of fell in love with like their cadence and their language.

And I was like, oh, I really have things to say and things to express as a young person.

I think the biggest gift that poetry has given me is that sense of like, I have a voice and that voice matters and that people are listening and also sort of like that thing sort of flipped on its head as well as that everyone else has a voice.

Everyone else's voices matter.

And I'm listening, Birth, gravity that which pulls a body to the Earth's blazing center.

My beginning, that which was always a body being returned to the earth, to the plantations wet will, to the spinning wheel, My beginning, that which was always a body being returned to the mule and the things that carry through the seasons.

The plow, summers humid rain, the sound a lash makes on the back.

What I mean to say is pain and the earth lush inheritance.

My beginning was the wound of labor.

A hand caught inside a machine was watching all the girl like things drained themselves from me.

In the beginning, I prayed in between the blue eyes of a river so you could be born of all the right water.

In the beginning, your eye floods with blues water, womb water.

I return you to good pain, good blood, good light.

I return you to the world.

So, your mother could carry you through like a season.