Don’t Forget Why We’re Angry
There is an ache in the hallway before the door,
even now, after many fires and many quick getaways;
safe retreats can often become our cages
an opaque sky keeps secrets of its orbit around imagined things
that hold them due to some kind of gravity
and a heaven was draped with a dread of dark nights
when stars bled due to revenge
and women rose up from their blood-soaked beds
and cursed like banshees at such injustices
to whit, we wear a red cord when love dies at the hand of others;
even a whisper that it might be murdered
has us drawing back like grip of whip
and our anger will ride a wicked tongue
and all will be surprised, will be taken aback,
at the passion that rises like a crude weapon
there is an ache in the hallway, blood on a robe
and love will always bleed awfully as it dies
Giving Voice To A Broken Heart
it has been said that the young can not die of a broken heart,
that those who are much loved cannot die of sorrow
but there are long silences in a woman
who has language for parts of the body, for times of the day,
for a thousand thousand kinds of love
those silences are what makes a bird sing the moon awake
when night is shattered by a strange combined moan
that ends abruptly
it is that silence that makes the hair
stand up on your neck and prickles go up and down your spine
and you speak of ghosts, with your eyes wide and fearful,
even though you do not believe in such
there is value in knowing that the Universe feels the breath
of a beloved’s grief no matter how far down the ages we are
Standing On Bricks
The body as a battleground knows songs
of god’s to evoke, knows words for sacrifice,
speaks the language of courage
awaiting a pair of hands
This sacred spilt blood in the valley
between bed and bricks
turns the face to sharp shine of pain
before quick cough from natal drink
There is a name for your first voice,
for my gripped hands, your reaching hands
holding folds of the same scent
Oh, little name, big mention of your old titles,
so quickly retrieved, if it be the will
that letting go is simply a slipping out
instead of away.
This Might As Well Be Egypt
Strange land of seclusion, where wildflowers
cradle a parallel promise and fear,
Egyptian birds reflect in his eyes;
this son of Israel in his father’s land,
gardens and glazed sky his canopy;
the moon, his tutor; strange foreign gods
know the supplication of a misplaced mother.
We do not have to understand the language
of a benevolent blessing out from the land of Canaan,
that seeps from the moon into a heart’s well:
He will know how important it is
to break bread with the belly that birthed him~
he will crave the cup of his mother’s lips~
he will forget but remember
this almost dying.
Mothers are wont to swallow her own personal gods
when there is a life at sake: Oh, life,
oh, poor fatherless child; oh, landless soul.
Nurse: draw at the breast of this land
like a half-starved soul sucks at sky
and knows where the moon sits
on another horizon.
Your Delights Are My Delights
Sweet face that turned to gaze on this sad shadow,
follow me on my journey to her
where aloneness has names and brows, voice
and value beyond loss and losing:
in your fist is a fathom deep story ~
beautiful stories, sad stories,
stories so ugly you will have to spit,
blessed stories so weighty and serious
you will make statues of them
and keep them hidden in the heavy hold of your heart.
We collect; bits of hair, clothing, a tooth, tiny clothing,
those icons of a mother’s wish to remember
you belong to carvings on shards of pottery, crayoned pictures
tacked by magnets on half-full refrigerators ~ evidence
of your brilliance.
We can never be strangers, you and I,
although life may have you lunge away from me:
We are tender lullabies we drag behind us, for security,
of our love-bent past. You will remember
my delight in your delight.
I Meryt You
In ‘tween and twine of shadows
shade gives succor as service
and friendships grow like twining stems~
we cling to each other:
You are friend to me!
You, with wild red hair; such untamable treatise
on sisters, daughters, mothers, comrades~
you are in the scripts of my story
of how you lifted me, by gentle push;
held me, like brace and although half-bent yourself:
You know, you are friend to me!
We come from many kinds of murders, such as you
and I: We are broken branches, grafted-granddaughters,
on barely living trees:
You are healer to me!
We are not skin-relations: We are amber mixed with ochre,
we are Nubian and lily, we are so thin we rattle
and so fat we are a delirious dance ~
and in between, arms joined, shoulder to shoulder,
hip to hip, we dance rainbow ribbons:
You are music to me!
We are tears that wet down our lavender scent:
Our many storms, our many burial compounds,
our patchouli partnerships that we have wrapped
in shrouds and buried deep within ground cover:
You are my secret-keeper, sister of mine!
We are keepers of blooms under glass, petals
pressed between pages of our own kind of bibles,
stones placed on altars:
You are a sacred secret song to me!
A Second Kind Of Love
I never thought for a moment
that there could be anything more than fondness,
a kinship, a comradeship. But here are your big hands
crafting places to store my treasures.
A necessary secret to be kept: mist of lake,
a forgotten water, a steadily filling need to overflow,
a prophetic yearning a woman knows
even after grief slammed like rockslide
and dammed any reason to believe in such.
Here you are, the sound of violins and smell of lotus,
a water lily softness to your voice.
How could I think such of a manly man?
How could I not, for I am enamored of such, as well.
There is a firefly glow in the deep scars, like an ash
being breathed back to life. Oh, how the heart wants it.
Oh, how the soul seeks it. But the grief was deep
and manhandled hard. Things under pressure can ignite, still.
There is another name for this: dear name,
sweet name, gone name. A name wearing away over the years,
like a little rocking boat in a big ocean, it has become more lost
and weathered, until its colors fade and it has sprung a leak
that is dragging it down: Away! Away!
It owned me. I took it on like your old coat
hanging in the back hall, gathering dust
because I want it but I cannot bear to see it.
It was part of the defilement of love’s name.
I am new cedar to your dreams. I am contemplating
the appropriation of your artistry so you can make of this
what you will.
Twin Drums Of Happiness And Loneliness
This red drum has become an apparition:
You, my squall and sequestered secret,
how did this man come to take your skin;
such skin I knew by scent and softness?
A mother knows the murmur of earth that made you,
the taste of your young cheek, the glint of eye,
and pout of lip: She knows!
How like that child are you now,
bristle-chinned and rippled chest
who seeks his mother’s satisfaction and approval?
Ah, you are that song I drummed
so long ago and you have learned your warrior’s dance.
How my joy has grown with you; lumbering bear
who danced, once, down main street, in a parade
and people asked you why a white kid would Crow Hop
to the sound drums on a hay wagon that led your way.
Your answer was always: I am some! Yes, you are!
You are not only the child who made medicine
with the Singing Eagle’s drum group, you are the man
with drumbeats in your heart that sound a lot like war to me.
How can a mother be happy and lonely at the same time?
My Name Is Torment
How many of us died horrible deaths
and lived through it?
Blossoms have been picked, dried, discarded
like paper where notes have been written
and they are not necessary anymore;
those lists of lost faces, lists of inhumanities,
lists of things best let die ~ or disappear.
Forgiveness has a shape, many shapes, shapes
of many kinds of deaths.
When veil of new beginnings is lifted,
ghost of yesterday turns her pale face
to today, and her abject sorrow seeps out
and attaches to your throat and calls itself Fear.
Some of us find forgiveness in the loss of tongue
but the ways we dance has the direst of meanings.
Some of us apply poultices to the wounded hands
where fourth finger has been ripped off,
and dance of slavery is done. Hurt women, cursing women,
spitting mad as hell women, sunken into such sad women;
women who care for nothing other than their own sorrow.
I did not say Live, I said Living and perhaps I meant Surviving
under the scab of some festering forgiveness. We have turned our cheeks
but have never uncrossed our arms to let our fatal flaws fly free.
Isis Evoked
Lady of wisdom and tranquility, healer of women and goddess by heart,
take up these girls that the world has had its way with,
kiss their hurts, curl your hands around their hearts,
draw them to your breast and nurse them – they are wounded,
beyond wailing, are they wounded.
They have been sold into a salacious society
that neither honors their past, applauds their present,
nor secures their future. They hate themselves and each other.
They stand on corners, in their bedrooms, in hallways,
in pews, and pray the only way they know how.
They are pitiful in their anger, apparent in their angst,
and identify more with men’s perceptions than their own.
They made madness out of their misery, join gangs and cults
that express their angst in the most unacceptable ways
they can conjure. They are not Medicine Women,
they are miserable women, Isis, breathe love into them
so they can have the grace of women not grief of children.
These girls are not the girls who know who they were,
and are, and will be. These are the ones who cannot creative
gifts out of gruesome things. They feel alone,
not knowing that there a millions of us out there
who know rough hands of a riot gone bad.
Bless them with quiet hearts and quiet minds,
fill their empty places with the wisdom of women
who came before them, who lived hardships these hearts
can not even fathom. Bless them the right kind of blue.
Moving
Sometimes there is no real place to call home;
although, cliché has it that home
is where the heart is. That devalues
a place to weave, to work dough, to make gardens,
to meet for meals, to sit by fires on evenings
when night crouches on its haunches in the shadows.
To be taken in as reward for money and luck
has been many women’s aging lot:
What to do with Mother?
Crones sit in front of windows
wondering where home went, where lovers went,
where children are, and of what use they are
now that hands that patted cheeks, made dinners,
tucked children in, and caressed service onto family went.
What am I to you?
Hospices stack them in rows, plant them in shadowy gardens,
have their hair done on family day, even if no known hand
comes to touch a curl, an arm, a face.
Have I outlived my welcome?
Closing up parts of houses to stay warm, closing up houses,
closing up workshops and washing rooms, folding hands
and supplicating oneself to the schemes of directors
and day shift workers, and closing up bank accounts
to pay for bed and board: Running hands over old openings,
gathering up only the fewest of belongings,
feigning delight in future dreams, they moved.
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