The Never Show Us Smiling (2025)

They never show us smiling.
When the cameras find us,
they freeze our faces in stone,
but don’t tell the complete story,
the light that lives inside us.

My mom always says smile more,
But it’s hard some days when I look outside
Yes I know there’s sunshine after rain

I know our smiles.
I’ve seen them blaze at summer cookouts,
heard them crack open in barbershops,
felt them soften in the presence of our children.

I’ve worn them myself
after victories big and small,
after surviving what was meant to break me.
We smile even when the world swears we don’t.

We smile like sunlight leaking through boarded windows,
like resistance carved into every laugh,
like healing passed down from ancestors
who had to smile in secret.

They never show us smiling,
but our joy is not for them to script.
It is for us,
a mirror of our resilience,
a reminder that love lives here,
that hope is not a myth,
that we are whole.

And so I smile,
we smile,
not waiting for permission,
not asking to be seen.

Because our joy is the truest picture of us,
and we will never stop showing it.

By: Jeffery Beckham Jr.
Art and spoken Word piece