End the Silence Campaign

The last hour is here!!! I am going to near the end this crazy Blog-a-thon with a poem by the lovely Lucille Clifton. This poem is absolutely and utterly amazing.

shapeshifter poems

1

the legend is whispered
in the women’s tent
how the moon when she rises
full
follows some men into themselves
and changes them there
the season is short
but dreadful__shapeshifters
they wear strange hands
they walk through the houses
at night__their daughters
do not know them

2

who is there to protect her
from the hands of the father
not the windows which see and
say nothing__not the moon
that awful eye__not the woman
she will become with her
scarred tongue_who_who_who_the owl
laments into the evening_who
will protect her_this_prettylittlegirl

3

if the little girl lies
still enough
shut enough
hard enough
shapeshifter may not
walk tonight
the full moon may not
find him here
the hair on him
bristling
rising
up

4

the poem at the end of the world
is the poem the little girl breathes
into her pillow_the one
she cannot tell_the one
there is no one to hear _this poem
is a political poem_is a war poem_is a
universal poem but is not about
these things_this poem
is about one human heart_this poem
is the poem at the end of the world

As I said, I could analyze Terrance Hayes’ poem “A Girl in the Woods,” for hours, but I just want to touch on the very first line. It begins, “Why wouldn’t she have wanted to be there?”

Exactly. None of us can predict the future. Everyone of us has found ourselves in situations that we know were not born of the very best decisions. Each of us has made mistakes. But no mistake, no error in judment, no poor choice warrants a punishment like rape. Sometimes it is comforting to point to a victims choices, but this is only because tragedy begs for logic. If we can place blame, then someone it is easier to comprehend. But that’s the point. This crime is not something that can or should be comprehended in a conceptual sense. And hopefully less of us ever have to understand this reality. But in the meantime, blame should remain where blame belongs. Solely on the shoulders of the perpetrators.

Here is a really important poem to me by one of my all time favorite poets. This poem touches on so many issues that I would like to examine more deeply. But I would like to focus on a common sterotype about sexual assault – that victims should have been smarter or avoided the dangerous situation. In this lyrical yet haunting poem, Hayes shatters this stereotype with truth.

A Girl in the Woods

by Terrance Hayes

Why wouldn’t she have wanted to be there at first,
riding low into whatever song the radio played,
that girl running her nails along the worn backseat

of a Cadillac, beat-up and beach blue
with a busted muffler and fur-covered steering wheel,
that car clamorous and big enough to seem ridiculous

rambling from the high school parking lot
with laughter in its belly: two thin brown boys upfront
and the thin brown girl they’d promised a ride home

rocking in the rearview, music coating their teeth?
She might have wanted to be there because
they were her friends, just as they were mine,

and when their long blue door swung open,
even you might have climbed in and gone smiling
behind their tight-lipped tinted windows,

and you would have had nothing to fear
until they turned from the road and parked in the woods,
as they turned and parked that day where the road was soft:

the brown boys who turned to reach for the brown girl
and coo how she was about to be raped.
They should have known better than to fool around that way.

I remember the way your mother told me to take off
my sneakers and wait for you in the hallway
before our first date, and the sound of her footsteps following

you through a room somewhere in that house
as she warned you against staying out late with a boy like me.
After we’d parked and made love kneeling in the woods,

I laughed and asked you why she had to be that way.
I have thought of your body in the underbrush for year.
And I have thought of the story you told me about being raped.

Because they were my friends, they told me the story
they had promised to never tell: how the girl wept
even after they raised their naked palms, promising

it would be okay. It was a prank, it was a simple mistake.
They should have known better than to fool around that way,
those boys who were not boys, men who were not men,

their narrow veins, narrow rivers
of hunger branching into muscle and skin.
Who made the road leading from the road?

What was the song they sang before turning off?
Who made them stop? Maybe her weeping
made them become themselves again,

or made them something they had not been.
Before they reached her house, each of them trembling,
I imagine the girl drying her face, her mother looking

from the window when they pulled into the driveway.

Dean Young’s poem “Private Waterfall” is beautiful and powerful on so many levels. But I want to draw your attention to the very last section of the poem:

But remember how it felt to paint a flower,
how a flower was the basic building block of all things:
a hand, a house, a horse, the sun
mommy, daddy, baby, you,
a bandage, a valentine, a flame.
It still is.

There are simple things that childhood teaches us – imagination, sharing, love. Fantasy worlds crafted from a handful of building blocks. Dreams sculpted from a lump of Play-dough. A hand, the sun, a flame – all created from the simple image of a flower.

Throughout the course of this Blog-a-thon, I have been sharing poems from some of my favorite writers. They are not poems about the experience of sexual violence, but they all touch on some similar themes and motifs. What this means to me is that our experiences as human may seem incredibly different, but there are forces that tie all of our experiences together. This is what I mean when I say that rape is not just a personal struggle. It is our community’s struggle. It is our world’s struggle. And once we realize that it is all of our shared experience, we can demand that it change.

Our experiences are all built from the simple shape of a flower. Our lives divisible into basic shared truths. The petals of a flower.

Ok, we’re going to switch back to sharing work by some of my favorite poets. This poem is by Dean Young. For this post, I’ll just put up the poem. Next I’ll highlight some of my favorite parts.

Private Waterfall

by Dean Young

You must be careful eating thorns
not to eat the maudlin fruit.
I find it completely impossible to fear my death
when I’m nauseous
so planes in turbulence, boats in high seas—
no problemo.
But spring drizzle,
a bird mispronouncing my name,
I dive for the shadows
that only have a passing relationship
to what casts them.
Oh no they don’t, little chirrup,
it is shadows that cast the material world.
So okay, maybe they slept together once
when one was very sad and drunk.
You have to be very careful
when you’re sad and drunk
and the river wants you to star in its cabaret
and the artificial flavor factory is concentrating on almond.
You have to be careful
when you’re absently tearing apart a plastic cup
that when you move on to yourself
it’s easier, deckles at the edges
like expensive handmade paper
on which you feel mighty hesitant writing a thing.
Or you could use little scissors to make snowflakes
or a line of deformities holding hands.
I know you were punished when you were young
and that punishment took more and more complex forms
like a single-celled slap in the face
becoming mammalian humiliation
by the same force that led you from finger-painting
to tax evasion.
But remember how it felt to paint a flower,
how a flower was the basic building block of all things:
a hand, a house, a horse, the sun
mommy, daddy, baby, you,
a bandage, a valentine, a flame.
It still is.

Also, my lovely friend Michelle is putting up updates on YouTube about the Blog-a-thon!! So check out her page: www.youtube.com/naturalbells