Raindrop Women
Me?
I roam sable streets
searching for white candles and coconuts
to wash the chaos from my skin
even still I have to write it out
make dyslexic thoughts rearrange themselves
put order to the recklessness
that is one spirit
on three planes
woman with many names
who sees rush hour
and thinks middle passage
spirit crashes
in to unborn daughters who will never know
my / this / our pain
if the job is done full time
the scripting of manifestos and declarations.
We are …
women refusing to tiptoe
we
march stomp scream
kick sing write
whatever to sever the ties
between oppression and ourselves … .
Lineage
I
He was the only son
of ambrosia, with one
kiss it was confirmed
II
His grandmother toiled
in cane fields, sugar was
the scent of her sorrow
“I would like to do more of that kind of thing: travel, spend some time in a place and really work from a different vantage point. I don’t know what will happen in my work from that, but I trust my ability to find the tools to find my way into my work. I think I will sit out in the woods more.”
In the slave yard, it sets a standard. Desperate folks demonstrating who is hardier, or more foolish.
The Practice + Theory series is sponsored in part by the Frances Dittmer Family Foundation.
Originally published in
Featuring interviews with Tim Roth, Amy Hempel, Emmylou Harris, Matthew Ritchie, Wallace Shawn, Christian Wolff, Gilles Peress, Kendall Thomas, and George Walker.
Let me tell you first about what it was like being a Black woman poet in the ‘60s, from jump. It meant being invisible. It meant being really invisible. It meant being doubly invisible as a Black feminist woman and it meant being triply indivisible as a Black lesbian and feminist.
Audre Lorde
