You want me White

by Alfonsina Storni


You want me white
You want me made of foam
You want me like Mother-of-Pearl
You want me to be Lily
Above all others, chaste
Of tenous fragrance;
Closed corolla.
Untouched even by a Moonbeam,
Unrivaled by a daisy;
You expect me to be niveous
You expect me to be white
You expect me to be dawnYou, who has had all
The cups at your reach;
Whose lips were stained red
with sweet fruit and libations
You, who at the banquets,
draped in vine shoots,
abandoned his flesh
celebrating Baccus
You, who
dressed in red,
ran to your ruin
in the black gardens of Deceit,
You, who still managed to keep
by some unfathomable miracle
an untouched skeleton ---
You want me white?
(Good Lord!)
You expect me to be Chaste?
(God forgive you!)
You expect me to be dawn!
Flee into the woods,
Find refuge in the mountains,
Purify your mouth;
Go live in reclusion,
feel the moist earth with your hands,
nourish your body with bitter roots;
Drink of the stones,
sleep on the frost;
Renew your flesh
With saltpeter and water;
Speak with the birds
and rise at dawn.
And when your tissues
Have been transformed
And when you have put back into them
the soul you left behind in the bedrooms
Only then,
good man,
Expect me to be white
Expect me to be niveous
Expect me to be chaste.

Balances

By Nikki Giovanni

In life
one is always
balancing
like we juggle our mothers
against our fathers
or one teacher
against another
(only to balance our grade average)
3 grains of salt
to one ounce truth
our sweet black essence
or the funky honkies down the street
and lately I've begun wondering
if you re trying to tell me something
we used to talk all night
and do things alone together
and I've begun
(as a reaction to a feeling)
to balance
the pleasure of loneliness
against the pain
of loving you

Emily Dickinson (1830–86). Complete Poems. 1924.

By Emily Dickinson

I CANNOT live with you,
It would be life,
And life is over there
Behind the shelf

The sexton keeps the key to,
Putting up
Our life, his porcelain,
Like a cup

Discarded of the housewife,
Quaint or broken;
A newer Sèvres pleases,
Old ones crack.

I could not die with you,
For one must wait
To shut the other’s gaze down,—
You could not.

And I, could I stand by
And see you freeze,
Without my right of frost,
Death’s privilege?

Nor could I rise with you,
Because your face
Would put out Jesus’,
That new grace

Glow plain and foreign
On my homesick eye,
Except that you, than he
Shone closer by.

They ’d judge us—how?
For you served Heaven, you know,
Or sought to;
I could not,

Because you saturated sight,
And I had no more eyes
For sordid excellence
As Paradise.

And were you lost, I would be,
Though my name
Rang loudest
On the heavenly fame.

And were you saved,
And I condemned to be
Where you were not,
That self were hell to me.

So we must keep apart,
You there, I here,
With just the door ajar
That oceans are,
And prayer,
And that pale sustenance,
Despair!

My Love Reveals Objects

by Isabel Fraire

my love reveals objects
silken butterflies
concealed in his fingers

his words
splash me with stars

night shines like lightning
under the fingers of my love

my love invents worlds where
jeweled glittering serpents live

worlds where music is the world
worlds where houses with open eyes
contemplate the dawn

my love is a mad sunflower that forgets
fragments of sun in the silence

Desolation

by Gabriela Mistral

The thick, eternal mist is such that I forget
where the sea in its salty waves has thrown me:
The Earth to which I came does not have spring:
it has a long night that as my mother hides me.

The wind comes around my house with sobs and howls,
and breaks my scream like a crystal.
And in the white plain of an infinite horizon,
I watch the sunset.
Who can be called upon by that who has come here,
if only the dead can travel farther than she?
So alone they contemplate a still and quiet sea to fill their dear arms.

The boats whose sails whiten the port
come from a place that does not have those that are mine;
they bring pale fruits; without the light of my orchards,
these men of clear eyes do not know my rivers.

And the question that rises to my throat
when watching them descends upon me, is defeated:
they speak strange languages that do not affect
the reassuring language spoken in lands of gold in which my mother sings.
I watch the snowfall like the dust in a grave;
I watch the fog grow like one in agony,
and, not to go crazy,
because the "long night" is now just beginning.

I watch the smooth plain and I gather its sorrow
as I came to see the mortal landscapes.
The snow is the symbol that peers through my window;
always will it be at its height, lowering from the skies.

Always she is there, quiet, like the great look
of God on me; always its orange blossom over my house;
always, as destiny which neither diminishes nor happens,
she covers to me, terrible and giving ecstasy.

To Julia of Towns

(Translation of A Julia de Burgos)
by Julia de Burgos

The people already murmur that I am your enemy
because they say that in verse I give to the world myself.
They lie, Julia of Towns. They lie, Julia of towns.
The one that raises herself in my verses it is not your voice: it is my voice
because you are clothes and I am the essence;
and the deepest abyss tends between the two.

You are cold wrist of social lies,
and I, virile flesh of the human truth.
You, honey of courtesan hypocrisies; not I;
that in all my poems strip my naked heart.
You are like your world, egoistic; not I;
that in all I play to be what I am.
You are only the grave lady ladyness; not I,
I am the life, the force, the woman.

You are of your husband, of your master; not I;
I am of nobody, or everybody, because to all, to
all in my clean sentiment and in my thoughts I give.
You curl your hair and you paint yourself; not I;
to me the wind culrs me, to me the sun paints me.
You are household lady, resigned, submissive,
tied to the prejudices of men; not I;
that I am Rocinante running rampant
smelling horizons of justice of God.

Within yourself you do not command;
everybody commands you; your husband, your
parents, your relatives, the priest, the seamstress,
the theater, the casino, the car, the jewels,
the banquet, champagne, the sky
and the hell, and the one that will say social command you.
Not in me, my single heart commands in me,
my single thought; I am who commands me.

You, flower of aristocracy; and I, the flower of the town.
You in yourself have everything and to all you owe,
whereas I, my nothing I owe to no one.
You, nailed to the static ancestral dividend,
and I, a one in the cipher of the social divisor
we are the deadly duel that approaches fatal.

When the multitudes run agitated
leaving behind ashes of burnt injustices,
and when with the torch of the seven virtues,
after the seven sins, the multitudes run,
against you, and all that is unjust and the inhumane,
I will go in the middle of them with the torch in the hand.

The Autumn of a Woman's Life

by Jasmin Cori

Autumn is the season of revelationthe
burgeoning forth
of a richness and depth
previously hidden.

It is the time in a woman's life
when she has come into her own
no longer holding back for fear of offending
or threatening
or dying.

No longer blushing at what she knows
and who she has become,
she displays it freely
in the riotous colors of the hillsides
deep reds and purples, oranges and golds.

The beauty of earlier seasons
is completed now,
rounded out by the breadth and maturity
of a woman who now laughs from her belly
having discovered in her body a great and free land
far beyond what any man can conquer.

The autumn of a woman's life,
like the autumn of nature,
is a moment of brilliance
when we turn our faces to the sun.