This is dedicated to Heart from Women's Space because she is a sister. Because she is brave and strong and tireless.

Love and peace to you, Heart. This is for you.

***

The world breaks open. Underneath the layers, transcending the past, making the present.

I have seen it written. In the hour of our forced surrender. The world will diminish as the time draws near.

Aching with the lost and ancient tidings, her beginning has come. Rekindling our magic. Lusty, wild and untamed. Recalling to us a time when freedom was a word that had meaning.

Do we have her power? This one that calls to us. Cries out long forgotten secrets. Screams our true names. Falling silent as the moon wanes. She is the one that tells us of the future.

She comes in before the dawn, when our power awakens from the stealthy sleep of those who can ill afford dreams. When half of our world is drowning beneath the man-made weather, whether, weather. When half our world is starving. Sacred ground as dry as dust.

Speak to me of your power. Speak to me in riddles, in a woman’s tongue. This day is coming into being and I need no translation. I can feel you breathing, sisters. The calm static before this long-awaited storm.

Our storm.

We have been without our rain and thunder for far too long…

I smell the tumult of our revolution, rising from the east…

Come to me then, in fury and in rage and with warmth. I will not let the cold decay of this bleaching rancour. I will not let this mindless, bloody, relentless torment hold me any longer. I am breaching the walls of this prison. My love, my heart, myself within my sisters. My sisters in me.

Even death cannot strip us of our elemental power. We sisters do not fear the earth.

Listen to the seasons. Listen to the earth beneath your feet. Breathe with the beauty of her. Sing it out. Sing our tempest into being. And as the storm of us gathers on the horizon, know this. We will not slumber until every woman wakes.

Let the rains come in with the tide. Beat out a rhythm in women's time. And let us soar.

I'm not sure if this is finished or not. dragort doesn't think so. But I like it so I'm posting prematurely. And, by the way, the new user pic is me beside a waterfall 'cept you can't see the waterfall.

The Prophetess
by dani

In the night the prophetess told me of my fate. Beneath the sea, she said, beneath the sea. And so I searched and I searched.

But how does one get beneath an ocean?

And so I looked for the metaphor, perhaps a blue-green equivalent and the notion of the ocean. Beneath a wave or a crest.

It was here that she found me. Lost within a crest. Riding a gigantic wave. I had been swallowed whole.

My fate. It was a good one. Worthy indeed of being trapped forever, mangled in a dusty tome. But vanity always has been one of my strong points, that and an uncanny ability to appear beautiful although I’m not. Still there was this ocean thing that I had to settle. I must confess that having wet hair and pruny fingers was not my idea of lifetime.

And then she came. At first I thought she was made of water. But then I realised that she had no substance. It was all optical illusion her liquidity, her fluidity, her motion or e-motion. So now I wonder.

She said her life was on a timer. I think she set herself to time. Like a masterpiece, or a nymph in the wilderness dancing.

I’m not one for poetry but she had an inescapable rhythm. And it caught and I caught.

Like an old sea pirate I was tossed to the wind and I emerged back into my life soaking. And dripping with earnt ire, burnt through with her timing.

Before a tune was sent me and I was swept within its waves to another shore.

Life is verily like the ocean. I am once again lost within her depths. She draws me in and she draws me on.

It was then that I realised that the prophetess was right. I was already in the sea.

For a while I lived a subjective truth, believing as I did in morality. But all the codes have a propensity for change. Tidal. The way her world was slowly sinking beneath the sea.

And still I persisted in the belief that I change myself. A radical new faith deception. The truth was in the water.

And water it was. Like the glimpse of a floating note lost into the memory of sound. Play me again.

Though she was only water I can still remember the scent of her skin. Salt and sand. Hours wasted into her embrace. Captive in the smoothest of bars.

I loved her. As much as one can love like liquid. She came in with the sun and left by the moon.

Entrancing, disappearing into vapours and almosts and into the taste of silence. Until she comes again. Rising like a tempest. Rising like the wind.

Off the shore, pulling my soul into her eddies, sweeping across as many realities. Beyond the heat of fire. Beyond elemental ice. Unbecoming in intensity. Carefully chosen passion.

Who is she? This water sprite that haunts me. This untamed one that never lets me keep still. Shall I call her freedom?



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Thanks to Catherine MacKinnon for the inspiration and some of the concepts which have been explicitly borrowed (from What is a White Woman Anyway?). I'm sure she won't mind.

Raped Down to Almost White
by dani

and in speaking of my skin as raped down to almost white, do I not afford that every woman has been raped down to almost white? a paler version of their original Selves. in this confidence, do I rob myself of the integrity of speaking as a Black? but though I see the blackness in pictures of myself, I also see the altered image that a woman always presents. I do not see a person, I see sex. but hold. this woman does and does not have white skin.

it is the storm cloud of living in between. and colours all collected. but I do hold that she has been raped down to almost white; I am a paler shade of that I should/could/would have been. my grandmother has the darkest skin but this does not drive a wedge between us.

I will say this bond is more than blood and more than skin and you diminish me by trying to deny it. the white man raped her but did not make her his. the white man raped her daughter but did not make her his. the white man raped me but did not make me. I can deny you this.

I refuse to let you tell me that my skin affords me power. what power is this in a system I did not, have not, will not have the luxury of creating? what is this privilege then that you talk of? when my privilege affords me the best place on the platter whereupon I will be eaten.

my grandmother ‘escaped’ from her father. a black man who beat her. I do not call him brother. my grandmother ‘escaped’ from her potential husband. a black man who beat her. I do not call him brother. my grandmother ‘escaped’ from her country, a black man’s country that beat her. she ‘escaped’ with a white man who beat her, to a white man’s country that beats her still. I do not call the white man brother. I do not call the white man’s country brother. white man would rape me paler if they could. black man would rape me darker if they could. this is their war, not ours and they play it, kill it, script it on our bodies. I want out and I’m going to take my skin.

so here, hear. I call the black woman my sister, unmodified, her thoughts, her passions are mine also. my life, my self, my soul is diminished if I do not hold to this. here, hear. I call the white woman my sister, unmodified, her thoughts, her passions are mine also. my life, my self, my soul is diminished if I do not hold to this.

what privilege that has been afforded me was paid for in women’s blood. past, present and future. this I will avow. more black women’s blood has been spilled than white. this I will also avow. but it is white men that are doing the spilling and the blood of all women and the earth is flowing still.

in this I do hold, that every woman has been raped down to almost white and men, white and black, would rape us further if they could.

so I’m pushing forward beyond the pale, beyond the male politics of either/or. I will not be diminished.

sisters, will you join me?



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The picture I carried through the streets of Sydney yesterday speaks louder than this poem. However, I am not yet sick enough to search the internet for a picture of a dead child.

I acknowledge these words are not enough.

All the faces of shame…

his life was worth
less than the boots I wear
down this well worn street

his life was worth
less than the water
contained in the tears
I shed upon his image

his life was worth
less than the paper
his image is printed on

his life was,
is
and always will be

worth…

less…

I can show you
can I show you
a child

his pacifier hanging still
in the usual manner
a careless scrap

once caressed by a mouth
that is no longer breathing

these aching arms have held
many, many children

but the weight of this one is unbearable

and it is only printed paper
it is only paper

and so I walk this road in expensive shoes
shedding expensive tears
carrying expensive paper
adorned with his cheap corpse
and I scream

this life was worthless
this life was worthless
this life, your life was worth…

less…

than mine

hallelujah for the bombs of Israel
hallelujah for the bombs
they have bought me the freedom to walk down this street

again
again
again
again
again
again

ad infinitum

cheap words, cheap corpse, cheap freedom

and yes
I have to admit

we all like a bargain

This proves that I've been reading far too much Tsiolkas. Not that I even begin to match him. Ngh, I don't think I care.

The External

I will be overwhelmed by this lack of passion.

dying with your regulated temperatures. and your regulated regulations.

and we walk through unreal realities. and we’re stalked through unimaginative landscapes. and we kill ourselves to get a life and we suffocate ourselves whilst trying to breathe.

what do they call this?

love is a trick that patriarchy plays to reel in the stupid. and they have made us all fucking stupid. and they prey and they pray and they prey…

and I pray and I prey and I pray. but I don’t believe.

and these metaphors they go on. like this life is a journey. like there is hope. like existence means. and yes, chomsky, language is just complicated symbolism. this whole mess can never be understood or interpretable.

I’m glad you understand. I’m glad you understand.

dead deconstructions and inflated confirmations and bleeding hypocrisies…

maneuvering…

slaughtering your time.

read your tv. a death of a life. a life of death. recreate/be/alive, alive, alive. and don’t question. don’t fucking question.

truth? an unlikely purpose, describing a self that has been created. I won’t hold my breath.

a spiritual analysis. getting me closer to god. fucking me closer to god.

and habitual degeneration. internalising this softness. be worthy. be worthy. be worthy.

guilt… an unwieldy sentence. pronounce me and I’ll let you take all of me. into your rituals, into your shopping malls, into you baby-carriage heaven. and I’ll drown in your wealth and in your madness and in your fucking shit.

and I’ll kill, I’ll be killed, I will kill, I will be killed and I will laugh with your sanity. that this life is sane.




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.


Bloodletting
by dani

This is my time. A ritual bloodletting of the soul. I hold a prayer for the past and its long forgotten ghosts and offer a minute of silence to the ones that haunt me still.

Uncertain, I remember in the hope that I forget.

Drifting under dead wood with the memories of distant dreams and things that vanish into the horizon like my love. Was it you that I called for?

Forget me not, her eyes said to me once as I played for her and prayed for her. Played between the lines for a single petal of her time, to shape a flower like a kiss for her to sing to.

And I believed her when she told me I was broken.

Was there a symbol for what I meant to say, written in a foreign hand, understood but only in the darkness?

All is clear when I see through the blood-wine pain and haze of my revulsion.

Into storms and absences and underneath the scars of my devotion. I heard a rhythm here, symmetrical and recorded.

I listened and I writhed with the anguish of the world, and I fell… but only in her time.

And now I am. Spreading thinner and thinner until I disappear into a crystalline layer across a tumultuous sky.

Breathing her lies and believing in forever.