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The Seventh Sense Women who build nations learn to love men who build nations learn to love children building sand castles by the rising sea.
Am I to be cursed forever with becoming somebody else on the way to myself?
Tiresias took 500 years they say to progress into woman growing smaller and darker and more powerful until nut-like, she went to sleep in a bottle Tiresias took 500 years to grow into woman so do not despair of your sons.
Who Said It Was Simple There are so many roots to the tree of anger that sometimes the branches shatter before they bear. Sitting in Nedicks the women rally before they march discussing the problematic girls they hire to make them free. An almost white counterman passes a waiting brother to serve them first and the ladies neither notice nor reject the slighter pleasures of their slavery. But I who am bound by my mirror as well as my bed see causes in colour as well as sex and sit here wondering which me will survive all these liberations.
Of all the ways in which this country Prints its death upon me Selling me cigarettes is one of the most certain. Yet every day I watch my son digging ConEdison GeneralMotors GarbageDisposal Out of his nose as he watches a 3 second spot On How To Stop Smoking And it makes me sick to my stomach. For it is not by cigarettes That you intend to destroy my children.
If we hate the rush hour subways who ride them every day why hasn’t there been a New York City Subway Riot some bloody rush-hour revolution where a snarl goes on from push to a shove that does not stop at the platform’s edge the whining of automated trains will drown out the screams of our bloody and releasing testament to a last chance or hope of change.
When we realize how much of us is spent in rush hour subways underground no real exit it will matter less what token we pay for change.
Dear Jonno there are pigeons who nest on the Staten Island Ferry and raise their young between the moving decks and never touch ashore. Every voyage is a journey. Cherish this city left you by default include it in your daydreams there are still secrets in the streets even I have not discovered who knows if the old men who shine shoes on the Staten Island Ferry carry their world in a box slung across their shoulders if they share their lunch with birds
flying back and forth upon an endless journey if they ever find their way back home.
Now Woman power is Black power is Human power is always feeling my heart beats as my eyes open as my hands move as my mouth speaks I am are you Ready.
Genocide doesn’t only mean bombs at high noon and the cameras panning in on the ruptured stomach of somebody else’s pubescent daughter. A small difference in time and space names that war while we live 117th street at high noon powerlessly familiar. We are raped of our children in silence giving birth to spots quickly rubbed out at dawn on the streets of Jamaica or left all the time in the world for the nightmare of idleness to turn their hands against us.
The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.
Today that 37 year old white man with 13 years of police forcing was set free by eleven white men who said they were satisfied justice had been done and one Black Woman who said “They convinced me” meaning they had dragged her 4′10″ Black Womans frame over the hot coals of four centuries of white male approval until she let go the first real power she ever had and lined her own womb with cement to make a graveyard for our children.
My children play with skulls for their classrooms are guarded by warlocks who scream at the walls collapsing into paper toilets plump witchs mouth ancient curses in an untaught tongue test children upon their meanings assign grades in a holocaust ranging from fury down through contempt.
The black unicorn is restless the black unicorn is unrelenting the black unicorn is not free.
I did not fall from the sky I nor descend like a plague of locusts to drink color and strength from the earth and I do not come like rain as a tribute or symbol for earth’s becoming I come as a woman dark and open some times I fall like night softly and terrible only when I must die in order to rise again.
I come like a woman who I am spreading out through nights laughter and promise and dark heat warming whatever I touch that is living consuming only what is already dead.
So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.
I am tired of writing memorials to black men whom I was on the brink of knowing weary like fig trees weighted like a crepe myrtle with all the black substance poured into earth before earth is ready to bear. I am tired of holy deaths
Sun make me whole again to love the shattered truths of me spilling out like dragons teeth through the hot lies of those who say they love me when I am done each shard will spring up complete and armed like a warrior woman hot to be dealt with slipping through alleyways of musical night people humming Mozart was a white dude.
Strong women know the taste of their own hatred I must always be building nests in a windy place I want the safety of oblique numbers that do not include me a beautiful woman with ugly moments secret and patient as the amused and ponderous elephants catering to Hannibal’s ambition as they swayed on their own way home.
Our labor has become more important than our silence.
I dream of a place between your breasts to build my house like a haven where I plant crops in your body an endless harvest where the commonest rock is moonstone and ebony opal giving milk to all of my hungers and your night comes down upon me like a nurturing rain.
I know the boundaries of my nation lie within myself but when I see old movies of the final liberation of Paris with french tanks rumbling over land that is their own again and old french men weeping hats over their hearts singing a triumphant national anthem My eyes fill up with muddy tears that have no earth to fall upon.
Lacking what they want to see makes my eyes hungry and eyes can feel only pain. Once I lived behind thick walls of glass and my eyes belonged to a different ethic timidly rubbing the edges of whatever turned them on. Seeing usually was a matter of what was in front of my eyes matching what was behind my brain. Now my eyes have become a part of me exposed quick risky and open to all the same dangers. I see much better now and my eyes hurt.
Don’t make waves is good advice from a leaky boat.
First rule of the road: attend quiet victims first.
Second rule of the road: any wound will stop bleeding if you press down hard enough.
I was born in the gut of Blackness from between my mother’s particular thighs her waters broke upon blue-flowered lineoleum and turned to slush in the Harlem cold 10 PM on a full moon’s night my head crested round as a clock “You were so dark,” my mother said “I thought you were a boy”
A blade in the bed of a child will slice up nightmare into simpler hungers. But a knife is a dangerous gift girl brave enough to be crazy you may never read this poem again so commit it like sin or a promise to the place where poetry arms your beauty with a hundred knives some mined in the hills above Whydah for a good looking Creek on the run. The rhythms of your long body do not yet move in my blood but the first full moon of this year is a void of course moon I dream I am precious rock touching the edge of you that needs the moon’s loving.
Afraid is a country with no exit visas a wire of ants walking the horizon embroiders our passports at birth Johannesburg Alabama a dark girl flees the cattle prods skin hanging from her shredded nails escapes into my nightmare half an hour before the Shatila dawn wakes in the well of a borrowed Volkswagen or a rickety midnight sleeper out of White River Junction Washington bound again gulps carbon monoxide in a false-bottomed truck fording the Braceras Grande or an up-country river grenades held dry in a calabash leaving.
Children of war learn to grow up alone and silently hoping no one will notice somebody’s life could depend on it. Children of war know the worst times come announced by a disagreeable whine mother’s rage always relieved by a definite reason.
Is the alphabet responsible for the book in which it is written that makes me peevish and nasty and wish I were dumb again? We practiced drawing our letters digging into the top of the desk and old Sister Eymard rapped our knuckles until they bled she was the meanest of all and we knew she was crazy but none of the grownups would listen to us until she died in a madhouse. I am a bleak heroism of words that refuse to be buried alive with the liars.
Gloria has a permit to change the earth plucks flies from the air while discussing revolution is taken for local in a lot of different places.
