The stain of love
Is upon the world.
Yellow, yellow, yellow,
It eats into the leaves,
Smears with saffron
The horned branches that lean
Heavily
Against a smooth purple sky.

There is no light—
Only a honey-thick stain
That drips from leaf to leaf
And limb to limb
Spoiling the colours
Of the whole world.

I am alone.
The weight of love
Has buoyed me up
Till my head
Knocks against the sky.

See me!
My hair is dripping with nectar—
Starlings carry it
On their black wings.
See, at last
My arms and my hands
Are lying idle.

How can I tell
If I shall ever love you again
As I do now?

About me, nothing worse
they will tell you, my love,
than what I told you.

I lived in the prairies
before I got to know you
and I did not wait love but I was
laying in wait for and I jumped on the rose.

What more can they tell you?
I am neither good nor bad but a man,
and they will then associate the danger
of my life, which you know
and which with your passion you shared.

And good, this danger
is danger of love, of complete love
for all life,
for all lives,
and if this love brings us
the death and the prisons,
I am sure that your big eyes,
as when I kiss them,
will then close with pride,
into double pride, love,
with your pride and my pride.

But to my ears they will come before
to wear down the tour
of the sweet and hard love which binds us,
and they will say: “The one
you love,
is not a woman for you,
Why do you love her? I think
you could find one more beautiful,
more serious, more deep,
more other, you understand me, look how she’s light,
and what a head she has,
and look at how she dresses,
and etcetera and etcetera”.

And I in these lines say:
Like this I want you, love,
love, Like this I love you,
as you dress
and how your hair lifts up
and how your mouth smiles,
light as the water
of the spring upon the pure stones,
Like this I love you, beloved.

To bread I do not ask to teach me
but only not to lack during every day of life.
I don’t know anything about light, from where
it comes nor where it goes,
I only want the light to light up,
I do not ask to the night
explanations,
I wait for it and it envelops me,
And so you, bread and light
And shadow are.

You came to my life
with what you were bringing,
made
of light and bread and shadow I expected you,
and Like this I need you,
Like this I love you,
and to those who want to hear tomorrow
that which I will not tell them, let them read it here,
and let them back off today because it is early
for these arguments.

Tomorrow we will only give them
a leaf of the tree of our love, a leaf
which will fall on the earth
like if it had been made by our lips
like a kiss which falls
from our invincible heights
to show the fire and the tenderness
of a true love.

This Neruda poem has been on my mind tonight. And Edna St. Vincent Millay’s What lips my lips have kissed and where and why I have forgotten…Listen to me read this depressing, beautiful sonnet.

miss rosie
by Lucille Clifton

when I watch you
wrapped up like garbage
sitting, surrounded by the smell
of too old potato peels
or
when I watch you
in your old man’s shoes
with the little toe cut out
sitting, waiting for your mind
like next week’s grocery
I say
when I watch you
you wet brown bag of a woman
who used to be the best looking gal in Georgia
used to be called the Georgia Rose
I stand up
through your destruction
I stand up

Poem about My Rights
by June Jordan

Even tonight and I need to take a walk and clear

my head about this poem about why I can’t

go out without changing my clothes my shoes

my body posture my gender identity my age

my status as a woman alone in the evening/

alone on the streets/alone not being the point/

the point being that I can’t do what I want

to do with my own body because I am the wrong

sex the wrong age the wrong skin and

suppose it was not here in the city but down on the beach/

or far into the woods and I wanted to go

there by myself thinking about God/or thinking

about children or thinking about the world/all of it

disclosed by the stars and the silence:

I could not go and I could not think and I could not

stay there

alone

as I need to be

alone because I can’t do what I want to do with my own

body and

who in the hell set things up

like this

and in France they say if the guy penetrates

but does not ejaculate then he did not rape me

and if after stabbing him if after screams if

after begging the bastard and if even after smashing

a hammer to his head if even after that if he

and his buddies fuck me after that

then I consented and there was

no rape because finally you understand finally

they fucked me over because I was wrong I was

wrong again to be me being me where I was/wrong

to be who I am

which is exactly like South Africa

penetrating into Namibia penetrating into

Angola and does that mean I mean how do you know if

Pretoria ejaculates what will the evidence look like the

proof of the monster jackboot ejaculation on Blackland

and if

after Namibia and if after Angola and if after Zimbabwe

and if after all of my kinsmen and women resist even to

self-immolation of the villages and if after that

we lose nevertheless what will the big boys say will they

claim my consent:

Do You Follow Me: We are the wrong people of

the wrong skin on the wrong continent and what

in the hell is everybody being reasonable about

and according to the Times this week

back in 1966 the C.I.A. decided that they had this problem

and the problem was a man named Nkrumah so they

killed him and before that it was Patrice Lumumba

and before that it was my father on the campus

of my Ivy League school and my father afraid

to walk into the cafeteria because he said he

was wrong the wrong age the wrong skin the wrong

gender identity and he was paying my tuition and

before that

it was my father saying I was wrong saying that

I should have been a boy because he wanted one/a

boy and that I should have been lighter skinned and

that I should have had straighter hair and that

I should not be so boy crazy but instead I should

just be one/a boy and before that

it was my mother pleading plastic surgery for

my nose and braces for my teeth and telling me

to let the books loose to let them loose in other

words

I am very familiar with the problems of the C.I.A.

and the problems of South Africa and the problems

of Exxon Corporation and the problems of white

America in general and the problems of the teachers

and the preachers and the F.B.I. and the social

workers and my particular Mom and Dad/I am very

familiar with the problems because the problems

turn out to be

me

I am the history of rape

I am the history of the rejection of who I am

I am the history of the terrorized incarceration of

myself

I am the history of battery assault and limitless

armies against whatever I want to do with my mind

and my body and my soul and

whether it’s about walking out at night

or whether it’s about the love that I feel or

whether it’s about the sanctity of my vagina or

the sanctity of my national boundaries

or the sanctity of my leaders or the sanctity

of each and every desire

that I know from my personal and idiosyncratic

and indisputably single and singular heart

I have been raped

be-

cause I have been wrong the wrong sex the wrong age

the wrong skin the wrong nose the wrong hair the

wrong need the wrong dream the wrong geographic

the wrong sartorial I

I have been the meaning of rape

I have been the problem everyone seeks to

eliminate by forced

penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/

but let this be unmistakable this poem

is not consent I do not consent

to my mother to my father to the teachers to

the F.B.I. to South Africa to Bedford-Stuy

to Park Avenue to American Airlines to the hardon

idlers on the corners to the sneaky creeps in

cars

I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name

My name is my own my own my own

and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this

but I can tell you that from now on my resistance

my simple and daily and nightly self-determination

may very well cost you your life

It’s time for men to contemplate this in meaningful, thoughtful and transparent ways, with other men of color, with boys of color, with the men that call us bitch, cunt, vendida, traitor, thundercunts, ho’s, nappy headed, ugly.

It’s time to push this thing to the next level, to put your money where your mouth is.

It’s time to push this to the next level, so we ALL can be free.”

— BrownFemiPower

http://culturekitchen.com/quotes/brownfemipower_on_what_it_means_for_women_of_color_to

The players in this painful tragedy, a trauma that this young woman may never recover from, are the teenaged boys, largely of color, who raped and otherwise sexually assaulted the girl, the bystanders who were largely adolescents, some white, some of color, the police officers who arrived on the scene and who are now investigating the rape, the school administrators, school security guards, the mainstream media who are reporting on the gang rape, and others.

No matter what some will say, there are other players who may never be brought to justice for their contribution to this tragedy but who bear immense responsibility for this. They are the mainstream media that generates sexualized, objectified and dehumanized representations of women and girls, or color and white in print, radio and broadcast advertising, in movies on the big and little screen, directors, producers, musicians, executives, shareholders, video game creators, any company and advertising teams that use sexualized, objectified and dehumanized representations of women to sell their products, and so many individuals that make up the massive, omnipresent machine of gender-based violence.

It made me think of the Japanese animation video game that came out last year that the mainstream media didn’t talk about here in the States–a strategy game that simulated the rape of a mother and her two little daughters on a train platform.

Halloween is on Saturday. I went to Ricky’s, a makeup and novelty store that sells costumes, to find a costume for my dog. Instead, I found an entire aisle filled with costumes for women, for policewomen, firefighters, nurses, maids, prisoners, geishas, Pocahontas, and the list goes on. Every single costume was minimal in length and fit, with pictures of models with cleavage, miniskirts, open mouths and wet lip gloss–an endless parade of the same portrayal of women. There were no real options. And I had to wonder, if a woman wearing one of those costumes is raped or gang raped on Halloween, how many people will think or say that she deserved it?

I know there’s something to be said for surviving. That the fact alone that I’m here writing this attests to the fact that I’m a least a few steps away from where I was, that looking in from the outside I’m able to discover things about myself, the people who hurt me, even the events and realities of my childhood that contributed to my conditioning.

A friend of mine who recently ended a long-term relationship with a controlling partner asked me when it stops, saying that even though I’ve been out of my relationships for a while it’s still affecting me. I guess she was asking me, when does it end? How do you go on? And I don’t know. Certain things, like the isolation, the lowered self-esteem, the self-doubt, those things are coming out now as I’m working backwards through the different layers of myself I built up to protect myself. While I know it means progress, it’s hard. I often can’t tell what’s reality and what’s a remnant of my past. Part of my healing process is figuring out how to tell the difference.

While I’m sick of the whole non-profit social service model to deal with domestic violence and empowerment of survivors, I wanted to post the power and control wheel. I looked at it and it was important to see abuse visualized, the show its complexity, it’s pressure and presence.

I want to end this on an upbeat note. To anyone who’s reading this, stay strong. While we can’t do much to change our yesterdays, tomorrow is brand new. We have to get creative about renewing our spirits and healing our bodies and souls. We have to respond as a community of survivors and people who believe in change.