like choppy water,
frothy and forthright,
she spouts
destroying
the placidity of my man
made emotions
structurally unsound
deficient of reason
wet like woman
she is fit
only for swallowing
like choppy water,
frothy and forthright,
she spouts
destroying
the placidity of my man
made emotions
structurally unsound
deficient of reason
wet like woman
she is fit
only for swallowing
The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.
I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds
and a dead child dragging his shattered black
face off the edge of my sleep
blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders
is the only liquid for miles
and my stomach
churns at the imagined taste while
my mouth splits into dry lips
without loyalty or reason
thirsting for the wetness of his blood
as it sinks into the whiteness
of the desert where I am lost
without imagery or magic
trying to make power out of hatred and destruction
trying to heal my dying son with kisses
only the sun will bleach his bones quicker.
A policeman who shot down a ten year old in Queens
stood over the boy with his cop shoes in blood
and a voice that said “Die you little motherfucker” and
there are tapes to prove it. At his trial
this policeman said in his own defense
“I didn’t notice the size nor nothing else
only the color.” And
there are tapes to prove that, too.
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 Woman’s 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.
I have not been able to touch the destruction
within me.
But unless I learn to use
the difference between poetry and rhetoric
my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold
or lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire
and one day I will take my teenaged plug
and connect it to the nearest socket
raping an 85 year old white woman
who is somebody’s mother
and as I beat her senseless and set a torch to her bed
a greek chorus will be singing in 3/4 time
“Poor thing. She never hurt a soul. What beasts they are.”
Excerpted from The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry
Related Links
Audre Lorde‘s Poets.org page
Audre Lorde’s Amazon page
1.
in the shower naked
he bends to suck
milk life
urge engulfs
we tumble into stream
barely able to separate
closed in by the enamel fist
2.
before the mirror
he comes up as i look at myself
cups them and squeezes
they jump up hard
nipples in dance-ritual
he’s to my back
enters
later i have a mirror
full of hand prints
3.
laying down his arm makes a
pillow for the right one
fingers grasp flesh
he lens forward
takes the left one into
his mouth
bites gently
wakes the eagle
i take flight
Excerpted from African Sleeping Sickness
Related Links:
Wanda Coleman – Wikipedia
Wanda Coleman – Poetry Foundation
Deprived of their original language, the captured and indentured tribes create their own, accreting and secreting fragments of an old, an epic vocabulary, from Asia and from Africa, but to an ancestral, an ecstatic rhythm in the blood that cannot be subdued by slavery or indenture, while nouns are renamed and the given names of places accepted like Felicity village or Choisseul. The original language dissolves from the exhaustion of distance like fog trying to cross an ocean, but this process of renaming, of finding new metaphors, is the same process of renaming, of finding new metaphors, is the same process that the poet faces every morning of his working day, making his own tools like Crusoe, assembling nouns from necessity, from Felicity, even renaming himself. The stripped man is driven back to that self-astonishing, elemental force, his mind. That is the basis of the Antillean experience, this shipwreck of fragments, these echoes, these shards of a huge tribal vocabulary, these partially remembered customs, and they are not decayed but strong. They survived the Middle Passage and the Fatel Rozack, the ship that carried the first indentured Indians from the port of Madras to the cane fields of Felicity, that carried the chained Cromwellian convict and the Sephardic Jew, the Chinese grocer and the Lebanese merchant selling cloth samples on his bicycle.
And here they are, all in a single Caribbean city, Port of Spain, the sum of history, Trollope’s ‘non-people’. A downtown babel of shop signs and streets, mongrelized, polyglot, a ferment without a history, like heaven. Because that is what such a city is, in t he New World, a writer’s heaven.
A noun sentence, no verb
to it or in it: to the sea the scent of the bed
after making love … a salty perfume
or a sour one. A noun sentence: my wounded joy
like the sunset at your strange windows.
My flower green like the phoenix. My heart exceeding
my need, hesitant between two doors:
entry a joke, and exit
a labyrinth. Where is my shadow—my guide amid
the crowdedness on the road to judgment day? And I
as an ancient stone of two dark colors in the city wall,
chestnut and black, a protruding insensitivity
toward my visitors and the interpretation of shadows. Wishing
for the present tense a foothold for walking behind me
or ahead of me, barefoot. Where
is my second road to the staircase of expanse? Where
is futility? Where is the road to the road?
And where are we, the marching on the footpath of the present
tense, where are we? Our talk a predicate
and a subject before the sea, and the elusive foam
of speech the dots on the letters,
wishing for the present tense a foothold
on the pavement …
Related Links:
Strange but true is the story
of the sea-turtle and the shark-
the instinctive drive of the weak to survive
in the oceanic dark.
Driven,
riven
by hunger
from abyss to shoal,
sometimes the shark swallows
the sea-turtle whole.
The sly reptilian marine
withdraws,
into the shell
of his undersea craft,
his leathery head and the rapacious claws
that can rip
a rhinoceros’ hide
or strip
a crocodile to fare-thee-well;
now,
inside the shark,
the sea-turtle begins the churning seesaws
of his descent into pelagic hell;
then…then,
with ravenous jaws
that can cut sheet steel scrap,
the sea-turtle gnaws
…and gnaws…and gnaws
his way in a way that appalls-
his way to freedom,
beyond the vomiting dark
beyond the stomach walls
of the shark.
excerpted from Black Nature: Four Centuries of African-American Nature Poetry
A-bomb is how it begins with a big bang on page one, a calculator of sorts whose centrifuge begets bedouin, bamboozle, breakdance, and berserk, one of my mother's favorite words, hard knock clerk of clichés that she is, at the moment going ape the current rave in the fundamentalist landscape disguised as her brain, a rococo lexicon of Deuteronomy, Job, gossip, spritz, and neocon ephemera all wrapped up in a pop burrito of movie star shenanigans, like a stray Cheeto found in your pocket the day after you finish the bag, tastier than any oyster and champagne fueled fugue gastronomique you have been pursuing in France for the past four months. This 82-year-old's rants have taken their place with the dictionary I bought in the fourth grade, with so many gorgeous words I thought I'd never plumb its depths. Right the first time, little girl, yet here I am still at it, trolling for pearls, Japanese words vying with Bantu in a goulash I eat daily, sometimes gagging, sometimes with relish, kleptomaniac in the candy store of language, slipping words in my pockets like a non-smudge lipstick that smears with the first kiss. I'm the demented lady with sixteen cats. Sure, the house stinks, but those damned mice have skedaddled, though I kind of miss them, their cute little faces, the whiskers, those adorable gray suits. No, all beasts are welcome in my menagerie, ark of inconsolable barks and meows, sharp-toothed shark, OED of the deep ocean, sweet compendium of candy bars—Butterfingers, Mounds, and M&Ms— packed next to the tripe and gizzards, trim and tackle of butchers and bakers, the painter's brush and spackle, quarks and black holes of physicists' theory. I'm building my own book as a mason makes a wall or a gelding runs round the track—brick by brick, step by step, word by word, jonquil by gerrymander, syllabub by greensward, swordplay by snapdragon, a never-ending parade with clowns and funambulists in my own mouth, homemade treasure chest of tongue and teeth, the brain's roustabout, rough unfurler of tents and trapezes, off-the-cuff unruly troublemaker in the high church museum of the world. O mouth—boondoggle, auditorium, viper, gulag, gumbo pot on a steamy August afternoon—what have you not given me? How I must wear on you, my Samuel Johnson in a frock coat, lexicographer of silly thoughts, billy goat, X-rated pornographic smut factory, scarfer of snacks, prissy smirker, late-night barfly, you are the megaphone by which I bewitch the world or don't as the case may be. O chittering squirrel, ziplock sandwich bag, sound off, shut up, gather your words into bouquets, folios, flocks of black and flaming birds.
Related Links:
Note: this a repost as the original post was not formatted correctly.
Two of my poems, The Death of California Revisited & Weaver Woman, were just published by Outward Link. Check them out!
At the beginning of last winter, I made a reading list of books I wanted to read for 2011. Looking over the list, I see that finished two of them (Wild Seed and Half of a Yellow Sun , read partial amounts of others (Omeros and The Odyssey) and put all the others away for future reading. Now, don’t think I only read two books this year! Below is a list of books read this year:
February:
(poetry) Song of Lawino & Song of Ocol – Okot p’Bitek
March:
(poetry) Nappy Edges – Ntozake Shange
(science fiction) Wild Seed – Octavia Butler
April:
(children) Mansa Musa: The Lion of Mali – Khephra Burns
(fiction) House of Sand and Fog – Andre Dubus III
July:
(historical fiction) Someone Knows my Name – Lawrence Hill
(nonfiction)Mississippi in Africa – Alan Huffman
October:
(poetry) Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York and When Winter Comes: the Ascension of York – Frank X. Walker
(fiction) Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
November:
(poetry) Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate this Ride – Frank X. Walker
(nonfiction) Lewis & Clark Through Indian Eyes – ed. Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. (in progress)
I recommitted myself this year to read more poetry and I definitely have. There are poetry books I didn’t include in this list as I’m as still reading them. These books include Prophets by Kwame Dawes, African Sleeping Sickness by Wanda Coleman, Harlem Gallery by Melvin B. Tolson, Neon Vernacular by Yusef Komunyakaa, Alphabet of Desire by Barbara Hamby, When Light Breaks by Melanie YeYo Carter, Dear Darkness by Kevin Young, the Collected Works of ee cummings, etc.
Gwendolyn Brooks on Langston Hughes:
“I met Langston Hughes when I was sixteen. When I went to Metropolitan Community Church to show him some of my poems at the behest of my mother who accompanied me and saw to it that I did this. He was most kind and read the poems right there after his reading and told me that I had talent and that I should keep writing. Later I met him again because he came to a poetry workshop that a reader on the staff of Poetry Magazine had started at the Southside Community Center. Her name was Inez Cunningham Stark. And he attended one of the meetings. People who belonged to this group were Bill Couch, Margaret Burroughs, Fern Gayden, Margaret Cunningham, who is now Margaret Danner and Edward Bland. Langston Hughes was mostly excited about the work that we were reading and he predicted a beautiful future for all of us. Later on still I gave a party for him when I lived at 623 Sixty-third Street and there were about seventy-five people or so crowded into our little two room kitchenette, and nobody had a better time than Langston Hughes who was real “folk”. Never any airs or pomposities from him. And as you say, he has helped a great many young people. Showing interest in their work and encouraging them.”
Excerpted from Conversations With Gwendolyn Brooks
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