Silent Deaths and Resounding Resurrections

I was recently reflecting on a speech by Audre Lorde  entitled "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.  In it Lorde states:

I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself.  My silences had not protected me.  Your silence will not protect you.  But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.  And it was the concern and caring of all those women which gave me strength and enabled me to scrutinize the essentials of my living.

What are the words you do not yet have?  What do you need to say?  What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?  Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears.  Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself - a Black woman warrior poet doing my work - come to ask you, are you doing yours?

A bold and beautiful woman who I am sorry I never met.  Like many, I started the new year in heavy reflection on my life.  The choices I have made and those I have avoided.  The last two years I have been running through the motions in some respects and I can't help but cringe at Lorde's final question  "are you doing yours?" because I am afraid my answer may be no.  The great thing about life though is that we may not be promised tomorrow but we have today, right now, to stop living lives of silence and to make a little noise. 

Pottery for Dummies

In times of crisis, we often first look for support in the wrong places.  We turn outward instead of inward; to the faces of friends and lovers; the ties of kith and kin.  The truth is that me must love ourselves first and foremost before we can truly be happy and have that love reciprocated. I had forgotten that of late and was given a pretty painful reminder today. 

Most people who know me have only glimpsed at one of many masks.  That is not to say the faces they see are not real, that they are an act of illusion.  The truth is more complicated than that and cannot be summarized by a simple metaphor.  I am broken and wear the masks to cover the missing pieces., each mask revealing and concealing but a portion of the whole of who I am. 

This week I was reminded that there are still holes that leak when I am overwhelmed and threaten to shatter the vessel of my life.  I was so busy looking for hands to hold the pieces together, I forgot who it was that had first reassembled the shattered piece of my soul. Me.

It was not easy and I was reminded that it is a process yet unfinished, but I gathered the shards unto myself and it was my hands that held them in safekeeping. Now I know a few people who would probably take exception to this statement and would remind me that my hands may have held the shape but it was them that served as the glue the allowed me a few moment of respite.  I have not forgotten and this is not to say that those who have been there for me mean nothing, quite the opposite in fact.  But, it is time for me to hold myself together for a while.  It is time for my hands to relearn the shape of my life and perhaps to redirect it. I am thankful for the support, but it is time for me to stop covering the holes in my life and to simply remove them.

My vessel was broken and I tried to recapture its shape, perhaps it is time for a new form to emerge.

(I said that the truth can’t be reduced to simple metaphor, but I didn’t say I would try to do it anyway.  I am a poet and metaphor is how I interpret the world….sue me.)

Peace.

Mercutio