Linthwaite, Illona (ed.);
Ain't I a Woman! : Classic Poetry by Women From Around the World
Virago Press London 1987 / Contemporary Books Chicago 1999
ISBN 0809225344
topics: | poetry | translation | anthology
[tr. Kathleen Weaver] Between sea-foam and the tide his back rises while afternoon in solitude went down. I held his black eyes, like grasses among brown Pacific shells. I held his fine lips like a salt boiling in the sands. I held, at last, his incense-chin under the sun. A boy of the world over me and Biblical songs modeled his legs, his ankles and the grapes of his sex and the raining hymns that sprang from his mouth entwining us like two seafarers lashed to the uncertain sails of love. In his arms, I live. In his hard arms I longed to die like a wet bird.
I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart. To examine the dark mysteries of the blood with headless heed and swirl, to know the rush of feelings swift and flowing as water. The source appears to be some inexhaustible spring within our twin and triple selves; the new face I turn up to you no one else on earth has ever seen.
"Mother, I long to get married, I long to be a bride; I long to lay by that young man, And close to by his side; Close to by his side, O how happy I should be; For I'm young and merry and almost weary Of my virginity." "Daughter, I was twenty before that I was wed, And many a long and lonesome mile I carried my maidenhead. "O mother that may be, But it's not the case with me; For I'm young and merry and almost weary Of my virginity.
(p.170) The woman in the spiked device that locks around the waist and between the legs, with holes in it like a tea strainer is Exhibit A. The woman in black with a net window to see through and a four-inch wooden peg jammed up between her legs so she can't be raped is Exhibit B. Exhibit C is the young girl dragged into the bush by the midwives and made to sing while they scrape the flesh from between her legs, then tie her thighs till she scabs over and is called healed. Now she can be married. For each childbirth they'll cut her open, then sew her up. Men like tight women. The ones that die are carefully buried. The next exhibit lies flat on her back while eighty men a night move through her, ten an hour. She looks at the ceiling, listens to the door open and close. A bell keeps ringing. Nobody knows how she got here. You'll notice that what they have in common is between the legs. Is this why wars are fought? Enemy territory, no man's land, to be entered furtively, fenced, owned but never surely, scene of these desperate forays at midnight, captures and sticky murders, doctors' rubber gloves greasy with blood, flesh made inert, the surge of your own uneasy power. This is no museum. Who invented the word love?