In another place, not here, a woman might touch something between beauty and nowhere, back there and here, might pass hand over hand her own trembling life, but I have tried to imagine a sea not bleeding, a girl’s glance full as a verse, a woman growing old and never crying to a radio hissing of a black boy’s murder. I have tried to keep my throat gurgling like a bird’s. I have listened to the hard gossip of race that inhabits this road. Even in this I have tried to hum mud and feathers and sit peacefully in this foliage of bones and rain. I have chewed a few votive leaves here, their taste already disenchanting my mothers. I have tried to write this thing calmly even as its lines burn to a close. I have come to know something simple. Each sentence realised or dreamed jumps like a pulse with history and takes a side. What I say in any language is told in faultless knowledge of skin, in drunkenness and weeping, told as a woman without matches and tinder, not in words and in words and in words learned by heart, told in secret and not in secret, and listen, does not burn out or waste and is plenty and pitiless and loves.
“No Language is Neutral,” Dionne Brand (via commovente)
