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FREEDOMWAYS                      FIRST QUARTER 1972

masked as denunciations and lament
as a choice
between eager mirrors that blur and distort us 
in easy definitions until our image
shatters along its faults
while the other half of that choice
speaks to our hidden fears with the promise
that our eyes need not seek any truer shape-
our face at high noon particular and unadorned-
for we have learned to fear/ the light from clear water/
might destroy us
with reflected emptiness or a face without tongue
with no love or with terrible penalties
for any difference 
and even as I speak remembered pain is moving
shadows over my face
and my own voice fades and 
my brothers and sisters are leaving.

Yet when I was a child
whatever my mother thought would mean survival
made her try to beat me whiter every day
and even now the color of her bleached ambition
forks throughout my words
but I survived
and didn't I survive! confirmed, and 
teaching my children where her errors lay
etched across their faces between the kisses
that she pinned me with asleep
and my mother beating me 
as white as snow melts in the sunlight
loving me into her blood's black bone
the house of all her secret hopes and fears
and my dead father whose great hands 
weakened in my judgement
whose image broke inside of me
beneath the weight of failure
helps me to know who I am not
weak or mistaken my father
loved me alive to grow and hate him
and now his grave voice joins hers

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Transcription Notes:
---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-16 09:58:20