The dead don’t lie
they aren’t sleeping
never passed away
crossed over
departed
nor do they rest in peace [Read more…]
Warriors Of Change
By Fran Finley
Warriors Of Change
Oh young brave souls
Let your music out
Sing your songs of sorrow
As you weave for yourself
Cloaks of change
Paint your innocent faces
With the color of blood
And sky and earth
Lay your hand over
Your wounded heart
And pledge allegiance
To end the violence
Spreading upon this land [Read more…]
Embracing the Border: Gloria Anzaldua’s ‘Borderlands/La Frontera’ | Women’s History Month
Suzanne Sanders / Women’s Museum of California
According to the common understanding, a liminal state is supposed to be one we use to pass from one phase to the next. It’s a threshold, so to speak. But what happens when that liminal state is a permanent residence?
Gloria Anzaldua, the noted Chicana, tejana-originating, lesbian-feminist poet and fiction writer (who also spent a great deal of her life in California), explores this state in her seminal 1987 cultural criticism Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.
Although Anzaldua passed away in 2004, her ideas may be even more relevant today. As an American-born Chicana, Anzaldua explores the contradictions and challenges of being considered neither one nor the other. She notes often in her writing that this Otherness is socially and culturally – and sometimes – infrastructurally constructed. She writes in Borderlands, “The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta [an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms, it haemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture” (25). We must question, then, the effects on this third country, this border culture, when President Trump’s physical wall becomes a reality. [Read more…]
Overcoming Gloom In a Grand Canyon State of Mind
The other day
I sat in my living room
caught up in thoughts of my daughter,
feeling a kind of gloom
that seemed to loom
over me
like a petrifyingly dark full moon
in a horror movie
that levitates over a chillingly mysterious tomb –
and I sought to overcome
this melancholy
as it was such a nice
sunny breezy afternoon [Read more…]
Geo-Poetic Spaces: Seeing
Stumbling out to see
fishing for a way through the hole
in a telephone booth
Time calls
from reflective glass
to the wheelbarrow dangling over
rusty swing set
[Read more…]
Potato | Women’s History Month
Coming from Ireland
the potato brought its pain,
all those it couldn’t feed —
the slimy boggy earth,
all those who said goodbye.
Landing at the market
in our dusty little town,
brought home in a brown paper bag,
it waits for my mother’s paring knife. [Read more…]
Geo-Poetic Spaces: Land’s End
Stay humble
the rain takes names
Time does not tell the truth:
It doesn’t count.
Not a mark made
the ground won’t swallow
no part of earth
that doesn’t float on fire
[Read more…]
Geo-Poetic Spaces: Doors
Salty sunlight
peels paint off doors
Exposes wood from trees
thirsty for the shade
they sloshed onto infertile ground [Read more…]
Geo-Poetic Spaces: Whirling
We whirl
on turning earth
circling sun
until the buzzing hive
hums honeycomb light
The universe expands
as we contract
into needles of pirouetting grass
where feet float
and poems write themselves
on the colorless pigment of waves [Read more…]
Geo-Poetic Spaces: Invitation
A white shirt
dangles from the window
a suitcase
waits 20 years to be loaded into the car
No magnetic
sense of direction
just unread signs
The gold hand
knocks
until rust shuts it down [Read more…]
Geo-Poetic Spaces: Sitting In Darkness
I took off my shoes
sat down in the darkness
I had been running away from
since dawn
Now that my eyes
have adjusted to night’s numerous shades
I see my effort to keep pace with sun
illuminated shadows
I don’t need to race against
the light of my darkness
any longer [Read more…]
Geo-Poetic Spaces: Mesmerized
A tree
doesn’t know it clings to cliff
Does not feel
the axe of a wave
resonate from trunk to green fingertips
It isn’t mesmerized
by the sun braided sea
that moves me to hold onto clay lumps
for dear life
A tree doesn’t know
everything on earth is
falling
Falling
in love [Read more…]
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