Marigris > Recent Status Updates

"He has a tendency to slip the bounds of the real, tangible world around him and enter another place."

"I know the anger that lies inside of me like I know rhe beat of my heart and the taste of my spit."

"Where does the pain go when it goes away?"

"What is that internalized and self-destructive barrier that keeps us from moving, that keeps us from coming together?"

"I am not free while any woman is un unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own."

"I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own. Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees."

"The future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference. The old definitions have not served us, nor the earth that supports us."

"When someone said to me, "How do you feel?" or "What do you think?" or asked another direct question, I would recite a poem, and somewhere in that poem would be the feeling, the vital piece of information. It might be a line. It might be an image. The poem was my response."

"Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly "inferior" capacity to feel deeply."

"We have too often been expected to be all things to all people and speak everyone else's position but our very own."

"And there is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love."

"The dear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our oppression as women."

"We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings."

"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?"

"feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden the fact in the same place where we have hidden our power."

"Am i altering your aura, your ideas, your dreams, or am I merely moving you to temporary and reactive action?"

"Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives."

"We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it."

"For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought."

"The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has a direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring through those lives."

"Everywhere you go, even among those miles of cotton being harvested in the Uzbekhi sun, people are reading, and no matter what you may say about censorship, they are still reading, and they're reading an awful lot."

"We are more blind to what we have than to what we have not."

"I came away with revolutionary women in my head. But I feel very much now that we, Black Americans, exist alone in the mouth of the dragon. As I've always suspected, outside of rhetoric and proclamations of solidarity, there is no help, except ourselves."

"I spoke in English and she spoke in Russian, but I felt very strongly that our hearts spoke the same tongue."

"Nosotras, las olvidadas, ya no tenemos nombre. Es como si nunca hubiéramos estado ahí."

"No sé todavía que la muerte ha estado siempre a mi lado desde que nací, que lleva mi nombre tatuado en su frente, que me da la mano por las noches, que se sienta conmigo a la mesa y respira a mi compás."

"Es cierto, es tan cierto que estoy enojada: con el mundo, con mis padres, con el amor de turno, con la profesión, con la vida, con el barrio donde vivo, con los políticos, con el cielo, con el infierno."

"Todo puede ser tan hermoso, todo puede ser tan fértil, tan imprevisible, cuesta creer que sea obra de un dios. El lenguaje es mío. Es mi derecho, me corresponde una parte de él. Vino a mí, yo no lo busqué, por lo tanto, es mío."