Tierce De Picardy

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[lifeinpoetry]

“in an expanse scrubbed clean of borders our bodies roam unbeaten unshot”

— Safia Elhillo, from “Scenes from the Concluding World,” published in Winter Tangerine

[lifeinpoetry]

“in an expanse scrubbed clean of borders our bodies roam unbeaten unshot”

— Safia Elhillo, from “Scenes from the Concluding World,” published in Winter Tangerine

[thesilentsojourner]

I had the luck of meeting Safia Elhillo in Toronto tonight. ( safia-mafia.com, oddballsdontbounce ) . She’s a Sudanese-American spoken word poetess that I am just in love with, and also one of my writing idols. After an embarrassing bout of intense fangirling, I asked her if she could write something for me in my journal - she agreed. So I asked the following question: “If I was your country, a country that you could wish for, what would you say to me?”.

This is her answer: “To my country, I don’t know if I made you, or if I prayed hard enough that you came to be. Forgive me for taking so long, it was never my intention to go missing. I’ve found you, you’ve found me, let’s stay a while & build things. Love & Love & Love, Safia” What a sweetheart this thunderstorm is.

[someonesomewhere46]

“These are people who know nothing of discipline. These are people with shiny teeth, who want to watch a girl pull the heartbeat out of her own body.”

— Safia Elhillo

[lifeinpoetry]

                             but what word can i use       to call my own       how      without disgrace             can i name my body     my wounds

— Safia Elhillo, from “Ode to Swearing,” published in Fusion

[gaymashedpotatoes]

“i pledge allegiance to no land / no border cut by force to draw blood no / collection of white men carving up the map with their pens…” - Safia Elhillo

[julienbakerfavormp3-deactivated]

Safia Elhillo, from “to make use of water” in The January Children.

[lifeinpoetry]

“if i live through the night i want to be // ungovernable”

— Safia Elhillo, from “border/softer,” published in The Progressive

[someonesomewhere46]

what you said to me instead.

strong girls like you must be

the world’s loneliest creatures

your silences, their own wilderness

where the men

come with promises that they will be

the one that gets you to stay.

big-shouldered boys who will melt

their bones down into currency

and will want to conquer you but

never claim.

you are the girl they chase

not because they actually want you

but to prove that they can catch you.

what they haven’t learned

are all the times you’ve broken your own heart

on their behalf, those clumsy hunters

who never know the right sequence of words

to do the job properly

- Safia Elhillo

[xs-a-t-u-r-nx]

POETRY FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF CHIRON✨✨💫

✨Poetry from the perspective of Chiron ***REDONE*** for those that had trouble reading the original post (so sorry that the original one was hard to read!!)✨

CHIRON IN FIRST:

“I go quiet for days

I turn the color of mirrors

The color of smoke

Men tell me sometimes

That blue becomes me

When I answer my voice

Is hoarse from disuse

I am afraid of my body

And the ways that it fails me”

CHIRON IN SECOND:

“ I was made out of clay out of time

The Quran says that we began as a single

Clot of blood

And I keep digging the wound

It’s warm inside

Some things you lose to mark the time

Yes men of course

But also some hair

Handful of teeth

Is what I am told

But all I lost was a language

But I keep quiet and no one can tell”

CHIRON IN THIRD:

“ I hear prayer called by a voice

Thick with something hurting

Like a croak but I do not mean that it is ugly

It is dawn in Khartoum and I am

Two days arrived

Everyone kisses my cheeks and asks

If I am returned or visiting and I think

They mean to be kind

I sleep through gatherings

And feel there is too much blood in my body

And that my name is my name is my name is”

CHIRON IN FOURTH:

“I understand why you did not call me back

I peel and I peel and I cannot undress

I wear my grandfather

And my left eye turns to milk

My grandmother

And the curl unravels from my hair

And I smell of flour and dill and acidic perfume

I wear my mother

And remember a garden of magnolia flowers

A scarf packs up my heavy hair

I wear my brother

And a bullet is assigned to me at birth

I wear blood in my mouth

Where a man’s name or a language

Should be”

CHIRON IN FIFTH:

“I do not always survive across boundaries

I pull sweet blue smoke from a coiled hookah pipe

I sometimes lie bleeding painted gold

And you need not find me beautiful

Mixed with water my border dulls

Here I am

Little dagger

Ready to make a home of your shirt pocket

Answer me Answer me”

CHIRON IN SIXTH:

“I want him to know I am not lonely

I have ghosts I have illnesses

I have a mouthful of half-languages

And blood thick with medication

Doctors line up to hear my crooked heart

Some weekends I dance

Sometimes I go missing

I fry eggplant,I listen to his stories that are my stories

Dead boys burned

Cities that ache older than our bodies

Our homes that are not our homes

Most days I feel I am walking through water

Most days I forget the sound of my voice

And he tries to kiss me goodnight”

CHIRON IN SEVENTH:

“And maybe it is too easy to blame

Morality on our capacity for love

The slow death that is putting your breath

In another’s body

Trusting your name

In another mouth

But maybe it is smaller

Say water Sweat yes Tears yes

But also the Nile as a vein between our two home countries

Washing the red dust from my feet yes

Cooling the seat of a blood orange sun yes

But also killing you

The way that only foul water can kill”

CHIRON IN EIGHTH:

“Red moon night

Makes my voice my thickest blood

It is summer and all the dying

Spill every crossed body of water

And I am a little boat

Making home of the stain

I have no peace

I have tall dark for a brother

I have the blunt wail of sirens

And every way that the dark can cover him

Can take his name from our mouths

I have all my buried dead

They root me

And all my missing dead displace me

Here I am

Stain of emptied bodies

Of women dressed in black”

CHIRON IN NINTH:

“We begin because the world before ours ended

Sometimes abruptly sometimes in burning

Sometimes we survived and met

Sometimes I do not make it

Sometimes you get better first

And feel burdened by the smell of smoke

The dead root me to strange cities

And I wish you could come visit

I shift the ghosts to one side

To make room for you in bed

I climb over your sleeping body

And make ablution in the dark

I kneel and say I’m sorry

I listen to a man strum a carved and painted lute

The sound is liquid and fills me

You wake and I am crying

And I will not let you hear the song”

CHIRON IN TENTH:

“Do you think a father is made a father

By what belongs to him

I already know that story it goes

Your father died young

He used to sing to his horses

I don’t know the one about my father

Yes he’s alive but he keeps quiet

I know him yes

I know he’s a name crowded around mine

I know some names do not survive translation

I know your father sang to his horses

To get them to dance”

CHIRON IN ELEVENTH:

Did our mothers invent loneliness or did it make them our mothers

Were we fathered by silence

Or just looking for a way to explain away this quiet

Is it wasteful to pray for our brothers in a language they never learned

Whose daughters are we if we grow old

Before our mothers or for their sakes

They called our grandfathers the january children

Lined up by colonizer and assigned birth years by height 

There is no answer

We come from men who do not know when they were born”

CHIRON IN TWELFTH:

“*Alternate ending*

The dead boy is poured back into his body

I try to leave home but the ocean bares its teeth

And where I’m from is where I’m from

And not where I was put

Its morning

And my grandmother pins hot colors to the clothesline

I’m still on a date and the words

Say something to me in Arabic

Fall backwards down his throat

…

I am looking for a voice with a wound in it

A man who could have only died by a form of drowning

Let the song take its time

Let the ocean close back up”

***ALL OF THE POEMS ABOVE WERE EXCERPTS FROM “THE JANUARY CHILDREN’ WRITTEN BY AN AMAZING SUDANESE-AMERICAN POET BY THE NAME OF SAFIA ELHILLO***

[dinkytoy]

“You just made language sound so much like music I thought you had a song for me”

— Safia Elhillo

[dinkytoy]

“I know I’m not a language, just a strange girl borrowing words for boys like you to make music into”

— Safia Elhillo

[dinkytoy]

“You treat my name now like a foreign thing, a finished song, a dead language.”

— Safia Elhillo

[dinkytoy]

To Do List

Make war look like dance. In the thick curl of your fists, Remember always That you have calligrapher’s hands. Dip the pen of your story Into the Nile swirling in your veins;

Don’t ever forget your body Even on the nights that make it hardest to claim, Pinned beneath the sculpture of a boy from three worlds too close Who won’t kiss you the way you like because He sees some forgotten daintiness in you

Wear your callouses proudly Parade the cracks in your heels As testament to a lifetime of breaking Prove that you are even more beautiful When whole

Stop sabotaging beauty Learn that men who harmonize it with your name Are not always here to take something

Do not forget the afternoon of your life A sun-stained love story Sung by a boy from Brooklyn With the most healingly beautiful hands Remember that love is not possession Claim the home you will always have a room in In his chest

Meet the women of your bloodline Warriors in jewel-tone chiffon armor With henna-floral war-paint Creeping up their hands

Learn from them How to make war look like dance Don’t let anything caress the fight out of you Paint silence on your strength

Never again kiss a boy Who has never seen the ocean He will know too much of boundary Not enough of sky Don’t ever lose the sky in you Or let anyone with silencing hands Close enough to your scalp To unravel the thunderstorms from your hair There is too much drought rooted in your blood To ever give away the rain in you

There’s been too much Sahara on your cheekbones Ever since you let the numbness in Reteach yourself to cry Reattach your soul to your body Let sunrise call you home

And one morning, birth a girl Named for a Coltrane lullaby With calligrapher’s hands And a country all to herself In the middle of your chest

- Safia Elhillo

[dinkytoy]

“Stop leaving your own life unsaved”

— Safia Elhillo

[dinkytoy]

“Because we all deeply want to be known by someone. the word for sex in Hebrew is also the word for “to know”. People crave intimacy at the level of the soul. Its the closest approximation in terms of intensity to what we would feel if we were totally one with God, at least that’s what I think.”

— alysiasache

[alwaysbewoke]

stokely always kept it 100

[alwaysbewoke]

answer? no. never.

[alwaysbewoke]

this is why ppl like bill clinton hated stokely