Gender is just another language
We teach our children
To be
Boys or girls
Roles liturgically
Played
Out
Practiced and
Performed
By tender pre-verbal bodies
Tag: children
Duty
My ancestors
By history and hymnology
Require me to subjugate
Poetry and intuition
To the calculus of legislation
A legacy of
Disembodied
Attorneys and mathematicians
Crucified in forgetfulness
While the organ roars
Victory
The Invitation
The Invitation
by Oriah
It doesn’t interest me
what you do for a living.
I want to know
what you ache for
and if you dare to dream
of meeting your heart’s longing.
I am
By Agape participants, 1997
I am beautiful!
I am passionate!
I am thankful!
I am worthy of all I wish to attain!
Agape: For My Elders
Know What was Born(e) here.
Love.
Hold on to what you know.
Life.
Follow your dreams.
Speak of your visions.
Your children are alive
and fighting
to survive.
For Each of You
by Audre Lorde
in From a Land Where Other People Live
Be who you are and will be
learn to cherish that boistrous Black Angel that drives you
up one day and down another
protecting the place where your power rises
running like hot blood
from the same source
as your pain.
The Difference Between
The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.~ Audre Lorde
Somehow, I always expect
my life
to turn out like a story.
A great novel, with beginning, middle, and end.
Characters enter and are made useful.
It’s supposed to make sense.
But it’s really more like a poem.
A work of art.
My own sketch book, tracing the contours of Being.
Evocative, but not necessarily
complete.
The clean, order I expect,
is, in its own way, the stuff of imagination.
Only in my head.
A Love Letter to My Full Self
We must be
what we are.*
Come, OtherWise–
you who understand.
Exult
and dance
in your OtherWisdom
with joy.
For, you
have been called.
To Be OtherWise 