While waiting for the shower to run from cold to hot, I think of three things I’m grateful for today:
I’m grateful for CoCo ( mini convertible borrowing from a dear friend) because it got me places I didn’t to get to today. All in one piece.
I’m grateful for the warm oat milk poured over Weetabix, with chilled blueberries and chocolate sauce. Comfort food.
I’m grateful for the chance to see my daughter today as I dropped off a book with her after school before she went on to her dad’s.
we dance with the flames
our bodies slathered in light,
years to come, we’ll be seen
in slow motion, again and again
arms raised, bricks thrown,
reaching for what was promised.
we are the sea – tides juicy with man’o wars
funny how much authority desire has over us
we want to be on the inside, wear the crown,
instead we’re always drowning in the shallows
trying to make something out of nothing;
make tenderness towards the turned backs.
Cinnamon sky rumbles
as electric clouds jag
over glass shop fronts.
Scarlet waves fire street
corners, claiming them forever.
Coppers and politicians
worry the faultlines
left behind.
Happy April. Time for showers, blossom and light. Oh and poetry.
As I mentioned last week, I’m honouring National Poetry Month with the challenge of writing a poem a day.
I’ve set myself this task many times over the years, and I’ve always been amazed at the creations along the way. Poems have emerged onto the page that I didn’t even know were in me and needed expressing.
So today I come to the page with an open heart and a rough idea of the themes or issues I want to explore. But who knows with the creative process. Anything could happen.
Anyway day 1 – PAD/ 001
Trying to understand “the difference between poetry and rhetoric”
After Audre Lorde
The contested site of black settlement in England
is shrouded a heavy fog of amnesia. The wrong colour,
the wrong body, the wrong sound.
Read the history books, you’d think we just landed
the day before last. 400 years of being here, lost
in the mire, weighted down with size 10, Dr. Martens.
Like transplanted birds of paradise, West Indians
struggled to put down roots. Alien soil. On corners,
skylarking and limin’, jobs, homes and a little bit of peace
denied; harsh whispers on the bitterly cold wind.
The contested site of black settlement in England
is captured in stills. Images speak for themselves.
Black faces filling the frame; black blooms pressed
against hothouse glass. But still an absent presence in failed memories.
I don’t remember when I started to hurt.
I don’t remember when I gave up on myself being enough, being worthy.
I don’t remember when I gave myself away to others at the expense of not keeping any goodness for me.
I don’t remember when I started to hate on myself and wishing myself away, wishing myself into something or someone else. Anything else but this. Anything other than who I really am.
I don’t remember when I started to hide myself away became secretive and dishonest as a means of protection and advancement.
I don’t remember when I stopped being my own best friend and started to seek this relationship, this love and attention elsewhere.
I don’t remember when I betrayed myself by thinking that I was someone who didn’t deserve to be here, as someone worthy of love and happiness and joy.
I don’t remember when I started to listen to others, the outside world and stopped listening to my heart, to my own wisdom.
I don’t remember when I stopped just {being} instead of doing. When {being} was enough.
I don’t remember when I stoped paying attention to what lights me up, my wants and needs, what makes me smile.
I don’t remember when I stopped being a child and took the burdens of the world on to my little shoulders like they belonged there.
I don’t remember when I stopped being in love with myself and gave this love to others who were not deserving of my love, who could not see me as me.
I don’t remember when I began to think I needed other people to love me instead of me just loving on me.
I don’t remember when or how or why all this happened, I just feel it. And now, here I am trying to get back to me, to me loving on me, the most important treasure, lost.
As I pull into the roadside drenched in memory, I practice breathing. Cycle through the minutes trying to gain ground.
She was silence behind her smiles. Behind her ample flesh. I burnt down our bonds because she dropped before her time.
I’ve too much fire to ever accept her truth. Too much sense to feel the moon held her fullness.
Late into the night standing by the window, she waited for my return. Without fail. I took her love and joy without a backward glance.
I am dark. Too dark. But meaning comes with the light. My own light, learning to shine from the inside out.
I wish she had her chance. I take her picture sitting in the grass amongst the trees and seal it into memory.
The earth she could not give me. She didn’t know how as she laughed her soul into existence.
I am red. All of it. And not at all. But with eyes wide open, body claiming space daily, I listen to her song and bathe in the moonlight.
I needed to see /feel/hear this card today. I’m stepping into the arena and I need a reminder of who I am, at the core.
This card is a reminder that the sun is light and light is the source of life. My sun, my light radiates from my heart.
My heart is my source and sometimes I forget this or when remembered feel this is a disadvantage rather than a power.
My light is my strength and my source and when I’m living my life from my source from my heart then I’m following my passions, speaking my truth and being my authentic self.
Of course I want to be this all ways and all days. But we do not live in an ideal world and there has to be a practice to maintain this status.
If I compare myself to others, or allow others to diminish me and steal my light, then there is a cloud over my heart and things are not right.
Today this card reminds me of who I am as I step into the arena and take up space on my own terms. I receive this message today with thanks and brandish it like a shield, like a force field around my light today.
I’ll let you know in a later post what is happening today to need this reminder.
The fire which burns outside is still greater, for most of us, than the one that burns within.
Burning Woman, Lucy H. Pearce
There are times when I have so much I want to say but don’t know how. Ideas come and go and those moments of connection, when something clicks and I light up. And then flounder in how to communicate it. How to express what lies within.
There are plenty of times I have something to say but doubts and fears get in the way of expressing them. I long to be more courageous and bold in my expression without fear of percussions or judgements.
I know what I think and feel goes against the grain and to express these things in public would invite the gaze, backlash and cancel culture.
For example, we’ve just had a four day bank holiday, where there were parades and street parties and celebrations for Queen Elizabeth being on the throne for 70 years. But really what is there to celebrate? For me it angers as for these 70 years, people have paid for the royal family upkeep. But more infuriating is that the Queen is a figurehead of colonialism; the subjugation and exploration of Black and brown bodies around the world for centuries. And as a Black person I’m expected to shut up, celebrate this and be grateful.
But to say these things to anyone, I’d be the one with the issue, unpatriotic with a chip on my shoulder as someone recently threw at me when I described a racist incident I’d experienced which was tried to explained away as something else.
Just how it bugs me, when the term ‘women’ is used there is a silent, hidden (white) before it. That the default setting for woman is white and anything else such as Black woman is the ‘other’. To point this out would invite the comment that I always have to play the race card, or not everything is about race? Not that when someone uses (white) woman or (white) women that they do not see me included.
A few years ago, I started reading Burning Woman by Lucy H. Pearce. I felt the rallying cry for women to take back their power. To not hide from or be scared of the fire burning within. “She who dares. She who does what they say cannot be done, must not be done. She who tries and fails. She who does it her way.”
But coming back to it today, the words jar. I identify with the burning passion and rage inside of me that I need to express and enact upon, but I don’t feel my whole being/ experience/ body is contained within this book or within the term ‘woman’. I know that if I dare and do what I want to do, succeed or fail, the repercussion as so much more dangerous, dire for me as a Black woman. Not even acknowledging this within this book, or other books I’m reading excludes my experience as well as makes me feel as if I have the problem, and not that white supremacy culture is the issue.
Reading Five Nights in Paris by John Baxter to reconnect with the place, I’m having to turn part of myself off because there are certain things he says that I could find offensive. Throw away comments about African-America jazz musicians, artist or writers who made their home in Paris are not given their proper respect/ admiration/ regard as fellow human beings. Some points I feel their talent or success is not theirs alone but down to the white people they were befriended by or associated with.
I think what these reading experiences are illustrating for me, except for stoking my internal fires, is how much my lens/ gaze/ perception has been readjusted, changed and re-educated. How I’m no longer duped by white supremacy culture and how I now see behind the veil, the workings and manipulations. I no longer accept them or toil under them in silence.
Yes I feel that fire in my belly, and I’m using it to fuel what I’m doing outside of me. I may still have some fear of being burnt by it, my passion, my voice, my expressions but my greatest fear is remaining silent about the fires burning outside of me which are denied, overlooked or dismissed. And I’m ready to challenge whoever is lighting them and keeping them burning.
Writing my mixmoir on my terms is my way of allowing free rein for all the things I need to express and share in order to not be consumed from within by my fire and rage. The writing process is taking the flames and creating something beautiful and scorching.
Cento is a piece of writing, esp. a poem, composed wholly of quotations from the works of other authors. It like a patchwork quilt, a fabricated whole from scraps from other places, people and times.
For me I also see Cento pieces like collage, disparate fragments of texts, images, quotes, colours brought together, moved around to create something totally new and unique which pulls meaning from the parts in construction but together go beyond their initial meanings and purposes.
Alchemy comes to mind as well as conjure. Magic.
Is this Mixmoir a Cento? No as I’m using my own text and anyone else’s that appear within it are credited. But I think there is an element of Centoism within the text as I pull from my body of work for the past 6 or 7 years to construct it. Also the different genres of writing and art that are going into the mix to create the whole is Centoist in practice, maybe.
This is an example of a Cento I created recently, which I think will be included in the Mixmoir, eventually.
Cento for black birds pushing against glass*
The first breath comes from early morning blossom.
Rain falls short. Look. The unbuckling sky. Rain.
There’s an old pain. The memory of water keeps
flowing heavy with blood. Bloodhounds catch the scent.
Black bodies packed into boats and the tide still rolling in.
A corpse dangling from the end of a rope. Justice they say.
And they cut off parts for souvenirs. Within these city walls
there is no room for self-love. Grin, keeping grinning at the camera.
My heart catches on fire as it could easily be my story. My body.
Along blood lines, pumped into the centre of the wound
it’s the body that remembers as tonight this river will receive
the crushed burden like black morels under foot.
Pull the earth on top of her, turn her black face away from the light.
I can not. But they’ve got the centuries’ old tradition to fall back on;
the rich white man and the black woman kept close
in the big house always ready to be split.
*Cento composed of lines from my past poems which were partly composed of lines taken from various other creatives. The title is from Lucille Clifton, and other lines are borrowed from James Allen, Kara Walker, Tafisha Edwards, Ocean Vuong, Billie Holiday, Martha Collins, and Toi Derricotte. There also a nod towards the film Monster’s Ball.
Living Wild Studios 