Buon lunedì, prodi seguaci!🏡

Da brava cittadina ho passato il fine settimana a casa, a leggere da brava lettrice. Visto che ieri era anche la Giornata internazionale della donna ho iniziato a leggere The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde ed è stato proprio un bel modo di celebrare l’8 marzo.

After a first book

Paper is neither kind nor cruel

only white in its neutrality

and I have for reality now

the brown bar of my arm

moving in broken rhythms

across this dead place.

 

All the poem I have ever written

are historical reviews of a now absorbed country

a small judgement

hawking and coughing them up

I have ejected them not unlike children

now my throat is clear

perhaps I shall speak again.

 

All the poems I have ever written

make a small book

the shedding of my past in patched conceits

moulted like snake skin, a nook of leavings

now

I can do anything I wish

I can love them or hate them

use them for comfort or warmth

tissues or decoration

dolls or japanese baskets

blankets or spells;

I can use them for magic

lanterns or music

advice or small council

for napkins or past-times or

disponsable diapers

I can make fire from them

or kindling

songs or paper chains

 

Or fold them all into a paper fan

with which to cool my husband’s dinner.

Collected here for the first time are more than three hundred poems from one of this country’s major and most influential poets, representing the complete oeuvre of Audre Lorde’s poetry. Lorde published nine volumes of poetry which, in her words, detail “a linguistic and emotional tour through the conflicts, fears, and hopes of the world I have inhabited.” Included here are Lorde’s early, previously unavailable works: The First Cities, The New York Head Shop and Museum, Cables to Rage, and From a Land Where Other People Live.