Join the International Blog Against Racism roundup. On 's special icon page for the week, the rules listed include: ” Post about race and/or racism: in media, in life, in the news, personal experiences, writing characters of a race that isn't yours, portrayals of race in fiction, review a book on the subject, etc.” Thanks, for the pointer to IBAR!
I'll share a pair of poems I wrote in 1996. While writing the second, I realized that I was writing it from a completely white-centric viewpoint, like so much of the 'classical' poetry I'd been reading at the time. So I wrote the first poem about my struggle to make the second one more universal. As Samuel Clemens says, anyway, about writing: “You have to kill your darlings.”; those pungent phrases that may spawn a poem or an essay often get tossed out during the writing process. At least some of mine got tossed for a good cause!
Apology to My Dark Sisters
“We only write what we know”
is a cop-out. Imagination
fuels many a rocketship,
feathers the spiral arms
of countless nebulae,
patterns the colors
of nameless lovers' eyes.
When I write that her skin
melted moonlight into the semblance
of living calla, that her
softness was echoed in
the blue-white tracery of veins
in his wrist, I stop, knowing
I am leaving more than half the world out.
I try to find another way to say it,
mostly I succeed. The words I leave out
cluster mournfully around me,
looking up with forsaken eyes.
Someday I hope I can welcome you in
without leaving more than half of myself out.
03/12/96 Strata
Gods & Goddesses
I don't believe in goddesses
any more than I believe in gods,
who at least have the advantage
of the masculine plural, the
inclusive English usage that
shuts no one out, in theory
if not in practice.
Goddesses by nature
shut half the world out,
albeit honestly, with no
linguistic apologia or sly half-truths.
I prefer to think of them both
as aspects of a greater One
whose gentleness spreads itself
in velvet over the skin of woman,
winds itself in delicate tracery of vein
up the arm of man.
The strength that flares out
in tight waves from his shoulders
is no less than the hard obduracy
of her open, serpent-gazing eyes.
03/12/96 Strata
Relentless Inquiry 
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