Some Dorothy Allison

“We all nourish truth with our tongues
not in sour-batter words that never take shape
nor line-driven stories bent to skirt the edge
of our great exhaustion, desire, and doubt.
We all use simply the words of our own lives
to say what we really want,
to lie spent on our lovers,
put teeth to all we hate,
to strain the juice of our history
between what has been allowed
and what has always been denied,
the active desire to take hold of the root.”  


“I need you to do more than survive. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way. Do not buy into their system of censorship, imagining that if you drop this character or hide that emotion, you can slide through their blockades. Do not eat your heart out in the hope of pleasing them"
The Women Who Hate Me Poetry 1980-1990
-Allison ...

"What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open."
-Muriel Rukeyser

Poem

This week, a 5 year old boy I know will leave Shelter. I will never forget him.

Somewhere, beyond all that
spins, a young man is standing
motionless, not a ripple near

He can barely speak
about the altitude,
the caverns,
the Terror

The time he lifted a boy in shards
from a jagged rock, tearing teeth
from his torso, placing a palm
over the strange stare in his eyes

Mound by mound, they climbed
around the edges of the canyon
to the very top

Never again to cower
in the dark

This is a good poem.

Slow Fuse Around the Cranium

Another gutshot dawn, and the day

Wakes to a crow alarm clock.

Have the birds turned anti-American, little

Feathered terrorists in the heartland of sleep?

 

Inside the wreckage, I can't tell if

The coffee cup's half empty or half full,

But it's all caffeine, wetting down

That thistle at the back of my throat.

 

Ah, sun, it's a hard morning

For you, too, those low clouds black

As a pew of Presbyterian elders, set

To ruin your reputation for a hot time.

 

For weeks now, the air's hung heavy

Over everything, the soap so soft

It's like a palmful of ectoplasm: not even

A cold shower can make me come clean.

 

For weeks now, my mind's felt both

Shifty and shiftless, brain waves no more than

Motion in love with itself, and less spry

Than old women with a leg up on ninety.

 

Maybe I should move from the Midwest

To the Mideast, some sandy place you know

Where you stand, like a lame camel,

Bad knees bent between God and atrocity.

 

But the heat's already here, and the caterpillars

Have raised their tents in the summer trees.

Why stir the one-eye mullahs, when I can

Flay myself in the doldrums of my own home?

 

I'm at the age for adages and elegies:

What there's no help for, let go. Not until

The fat's in the fire will it sing for you.

Even the sheen of day darkens in the dark heart.

 

Like those spazzed-out insects on the patio,

I've spun myself to a dither, and who knows

When I'll come sliding back, bone and soul,

To the absolute enormities of whatever life

 

The future might ring in, the rich bronze

Midnight tone of some Mongolian death gong,

Loud enough to stun the years and make me take it

All in good faith and down to the quick.

 

 

(Elton Glaser, Southern Poetry Review, Volume 51, Issue 2)

 

Alexander McCall Smith

Acacia

Notwane River

This week I picked up The Kalahari Typing School For Men,  the story of Mma Ramotswe, keeping her business afloat in Gaborone, Botswana.  I sometimes feel like my visit there in college was just a short, passing dream.  I will always remember the stillness, the smells, the sounds.

     '"Those are small things," Mr. Molefelo interjected. "Bills and debts are nothing, really. What really counts are the things that you have done to people. That is what counts. And that is why I've come to see you , Mma. I want to confess. I do not go to the Catholic Church, where you can sit in a box and tell the priest all about the things you have done. I cannot do that. But I want to talk to somebody, and that is why I have come to see you."
      Ma Ramotswe nodded. She unnderstood. Shortly after opening the No. I Ladies' Detective Agency, she had discovered that part of her role would be to listen to people and to help them unburden themselves of their past. And indeed her subsequent reading of Clovis Andersen had confirmed this. Be gentle, he had written. Many of the people who will come to see you are injured in spirit. They need to talk about things that have hurt them, or about things that they have done. Do not sit in judgement of them, but listen. Just listen.
      They had reached a place where the path dipped down into a dried-up watercourse. There was a termite mound to one side of it, and on the other, a small expanse of rock rising out of the red earth. There was the chewed-up pith of sugarcane lying to the side of the path and a fragment of broken blue glass, which caught the sun. Not far away a goat was standing on its hind legs, nibbling at the less accessible leaves of the shrub.  It was a good place to sit and listen, under a sky that had seen so much and heard so much that one more wicked deed would surely make no difference. Sins, thought Mma Ramotswe, are darker and more powerful when contemplated within confining walls. Out in the open, under such a sky as this, misdeeds were reduced to their natural proportions--small, mean things that could be faced quite openly, sorted, and folded away.'

A Palestinian Poet writes about exile

We travel like other people, but we return to nowhere. As if traveling
Is the way of the clouds. We have buried our loved ones in the
                Darkness of the clouds, between the roots of the trees.
And we said to our wives: go on giving birth to people like us               
                For hundreds of years so we can complete this journey
To the hour of a country, to a meter of the impossible.
We travel in the carriages of the psalms, sleep in the tents of the
                Prophets and come out of the speech of the gypsies.
We measure space with a hoopoe’s beak or sing to while away the               
                Distance and cleanse the light of the moon.
Your path is long so dream of seven women to bear this long path
On your shoulders. Shake for them palm trees so as to know their
                Names and who’ll be the mother of the boy of Galilee.
We have a country of words. Speak speak so we may know the end of               
                This travel.
                                              — Mahmoud Darwish, “We Travel Like Other People” (1984)¹

Janet Smith - Southern Poetry Review

The Children's Section

As a child I sat on stiff chairs
and read. None belonged to me.
I could be pushed out by someone
larger. I owned nothing, not even 
my face when a hand approached to
lift the bangs from my eyes, not even
an unbroken hour. I planned to read
every book in the children’s section.
I began with A and read about
archaeology and Antarctica.
Some words had a flavor: zodiac,
periwinkle, bracelet, savannah.
They held a space I could breathe in.

Childhood is a fierce land where
the laughing sounds like crying.
It felt safe to sit on the metal kitchen
chair left to rust behind the lilacs,
a library book splayed on my lap.
The heart meanwhile knocked on its
own door and waited in its warm locker
while the long years ahead stood
orderly on a shelf until my full pardon
would be granted. I wrote lists
of the titles of the books I’d read
as slow tides pulled me through
the locks of days. I read as I walked
to school, the margins holding me.