Black History Month: A Healing Poem by Leonie 

For Week Three of Black History Month we are blessed with a healing poem by Dr. Leonie H Mattison, EdD, MBA, President and CEO of Pacifica Graduate Institute, Carpinteria. I asked her how and when her poem came about. She said she wrote it this year, and shared, “This season has been very thick with grief, loss and pain for the black community. I’m hoping to invoke some hope for us all. I originally wrote the poem to help process my own grief – a way to channel the weight of sorrow, pain, and loss that surrounded me. Along the journey, I discovered that healing is not just about holding on but about finding the courage to let go. Releasing this poem is now part of that process – offering it as a gift to the world, hoping it might bring comfort, connection, and even a small sense of peace to those who need it. More than anything, I wanted others to know that I see them. I see their pain, their strength, and the quiet battles they fight each day. I wanted them to know that their grief is not invisible, their healing is not impossible, and they are not alone. If my words can be a bridge – a reminder that even in the darkest moments, we are held by something greater – sharing this Black History poem was worth it.”

“The Quilt That Holds Us All”- by Dr. Leonie H Mattison, 2025

Sawubona. I see you.

I see our collective journey – stitched together with the bold, the broken, the beautiful. Black history is not a single thread; it is a vast, interwoven fabric of struggle and triumph, failure and resilience, loss and legacy.

We are not here because history was easy. We are here because we learned to live with the hard chapters.

We do not erase them. We do not rewrite them for comfort. We carry them, stitch by stitch, thread by thread, knowing that even our scars have a place in the pattern of our becoming.

We were never meant to be perfect. We were meant to be whole.

And wholeness is not the absence of flaws – it is the courage to keep weaving, even when the fabric tears.

For too long, we have been told that Black excellence must look effortless. That our success must be polished, pristine, without missteps or failures. But true strength is not found in perfection – it is found in the resilience that rises from imperfection.

Instead of chasing perfection,
we learn to live with the hard chapters of our history.

Instead of hiding our struggles, we name them.
Instead of erasing our pain, we honor it.
Instead of defining ourselves by our wounds,
we let them become wisdom.

When we fail, when we stumble, when we fall under the weight of systems never built for us, we do not break – we endure.
And in enduring, we become something stronger.

Because our history is not just about what we have suffered.
It is about what we have survived.

Sawubona. I see you – not just as you are,
but as a reflection of those who came before and those yet to come.

Like the quilts of our ancestors – stitched from scraps, frayed at the edges, yet whole and unshaken – we do not discard what is difficult. We gather it. We weave it in. We create meaning from every piece.

Ubuntu teaches us that we exist through one another.
That strength is not individual, but collective.

Sankofa reminds us that our future is shaped by the past. That we must reach back, retrieve what was lost, and carry it forward –
not with shame, but with purpose.

So we do not pretend the hard times never happened.
We build from them.

We do not ignore the missteps, the failures, the imperfections.
We learn from them.

Because history is not only about what has been—it is about
what we choose to make of it.

If you are still measuring Black worth by how seamlessly
we succeed, you are looking at the wrong pattern.

We are not here to be perfect.
We are here to be whole.

We are not here to erase the hard chapters.
We are here to turn them into wisdom.

We are not here to prove ourselves.
We are here to build – unapologetically, unshaken, unwavering.

Sawubona. I see you.
I see the hands that came before us, weaving,
stitching, holding this fabric together.
I see the generations ahead, watching, waiting, trusting that
we will leave them something strong enough to last.
I see the future unfolding – not as something handed to us,
but as something we create.

Like the quilts of our foremothers, patched from hardship into beauty, our history is woven from the full truth of our becoming.

We are not defined by the easy moments.
We are strengthened by the hard ones.

And under our watch, leadership is not about presence alone –
it is about permanence.

This is Black resilience. Black excellence. Black wisdom.

Not perfect – but powerful.

And history will not just remember.
It will be stitched with what we build.