Spirituality and militant Black feminism meet where the highest art intersects. A highly educated Black female poet with a taste for T. S. Eliot ruminates.
Soul Work. The people one loses one's head over. The faces that haunt you long after death--death of love, death of affection, cessation of passion. The countenances and spirits that occupy cherished space between heart and lung and consciousness: Niama Williams gives voice to both, puts in words the entities--water, rain, that psychiatrist who took your heart, the glen in the outback where you sought to escape him--that make us speechless. Travel with her as she puts names to the unnamable, as she affixes words to that which had struck us dumb. Find your tongue. Watch her lash out.
Excerpt
GALVAN
one of you watched
cleared the air of ghost
thundering breath from hitched thing
only you knew was animal.
Most fled.
You surveyed the intruder
remembered your calendar
understood the prediction.
Ruler would die, civilization pass, dire
only your need to kill as many breathing
ghosts as possible. Fly to the hills
with wife, mate, daughter. Ring
a noose around the neck of son, thrill
in his eyes, desire on his tongue.
Those beasts are not for riding.
We have always been borne.
Rungs of hierarchy will not change.
Then the devastation.
Sing, you begged your wife, of rain--
maybe it will wash them away.
But the prediction held sway.
Aztec fell, peasant blood--formerly slave--
gave no succor. Vengeance came
in the eyes of a white savage.
Those sacrificed had prayed,
and now, now it was the end of golden, Aztec, days.
WHISPERS OF THE HEART is artist and author J. Allen Wilson's second book of poetry.It can be autographed and shipped within 48 hours of order. NO LONGER AVAILABLE.
