[Cleopatra: Asps and Tongues]
Measure out the weight of Man’s greed in sapphire scarabs, celestial feathers,
homebrewed poisons, and pillow talk. Scientist, scholar, goddess among emperors,
You have been metamorphosed into a scheming seductress, Taylor-made for the
American Silver Screen. Call to me in any tongue, I will weave You a tapestry
from their lies that You might coil yourself inside and strike at the vein.
[Billie Holiday: Song and Gardenias]
Part the haze and approach the altar draped in sweet satin. There, strange fruit
rots, drawing bugs and flies on the wall. Speak in rasps and croons so they
might not hear. They slipped heroin into Your hands to make Your body
a walking prison then picked You clean. Damn the suits who defile Your shrine!
For You stand among Counts and Prezidents, a Divine Lady of the Day.
[Tituba: Little Children and Vengeance]
Blessed Soothsayer, You are both the film and viscous parts spinning like dancers
suspended in water. See the future in its shapes. The well-fed yokes forget
amniotic origins, and now You are fingers reaching for yellow. You are the
heavy water sinking down. You cannot rage. You cannot drown. There is power
in Your pointed finger, in Your girl-game of cracking eggs.
[Matoaka: Girls and Joy]
You were a bare footed little one, doing cartwheels and digging Your toes into
Powhatan soil when You were made a piece in an expanding puzzle. Your girlhood
was left in the densely populated land of Your father, and You were taken like a bag
of grain. Stolen in scoops by hungry bearded men, used to negotiate the extermination
of Your people. Forced into dresses, false names, baptismal fonts, and Disney franchises.
[Rosetta Tharpe: Rock and Roll]
The Church is too small a temple to hold Your grand distortions, Your cosmic
resonations. Grab Your girl and we will follow to Your sanctuary, raise up Her
ebony crown covered in kisses, a sacrilegious steeple. Let us shout, Sister! Shout
to the trembling rafters, lift our Devil’s Horns, bow before Your splendor. Shout
to the children, who writhe to Your stolen sermons performed by a white man.
[Nancy Green: Breakfast and Activism]
Tell me, Aunty Goddess, what’s the world look like from the front of a box? Tell me
Aunty Goddess, what do You hear round their tables? The most recognized Black woman
in the world, put in that prison by the American Marketing Machine. Caricaturized to
sell hotcakes and racist iconography. There is power under that gingham scarf, in hands
that once beat batter and now wield picket signs. In a mouth no longer smiling.
[Dinah Black: Sanctuary and the Courts]
Someone’s in the kitchen with the divinity and multitudes of You. Sound Your trumpet,
reap the justice owed. There will be hosts of Dinahs after You, after You have secured
Your liberty with Your own two legs, for there are no murderous brothers coming to
avenge You. The thieves will make Dinahs of all Black women, a slur, a name,
an insult. Unaware they invoke a goddess who broke Her own chains.
[Sobekneferu: Men and Reeds]
The teeth in Your beard gnash the frailer things drifting down river. You are the
Waterway to the Field of Reeds and the ancient beasts torqued and twisting in
the marshes. Devour, oh Pharoah! Oh Goddess King! For the refuse will see to
Your death in the afterlife. A name scoured by hands, not time. Your Nubian nose ripped
from stone that bled honey. Make me a spile and we will drown them in Your ichor.
[La Malinche: Survival and the Peninsula]
In the opposite direction the waters turn to whirlpools and rot where starving Spanish
terrors hold You by the throat of Your baby while the Yucatan becomes a colonized
Xibalba. Your predecessors fell in the tens of thousands and in the face of annihilation
You fixed Your jaw, clutched Your sons tight, cried not my children, for it, Your
progenies call You traitor and transmute You from survivor to conspirator.
[Peggy Garner: Mothers and Emancipation]
When they printed Your name, they called You the Modern Medea. But for You
there was no Jason, no Argo. You bore the journey in Your joints, cut through lands
like an iron sided ship. There was no waiting dragon or little king. Still, You steeled
Your blade. Released Your children. Drowned the Ohio River in Your name. America
clutched her looted pearls, gasped from her houses built on stolen land, thief!
[Sojourner Truth: Oration and Letters]
You stilled chaos with Your voice, but time has stuffed Your mouth with the words
of white women. Sweet Speaker, let us pluck these lies like splinters from Your lips.
Drop them, bloody, into a dish, Ain’t I a Woman. She is a blasphemer, toying with Your
Holy words, molding them around her mortal thumbs. Words You never spoke in an
accent You never had, lies forced down the throat of a goddess named Truth.
[Las Hermanas Mirabal: Revolution and Butterflies]
Speak softly as You approach the Fates—the Sisters Mirabal—for they are
keepers of secrets and their shared eye is trained on the dictator’s carrion throne.
Neither clubs nor machismo break this stare, for it has steel fingers and sees through
broken windshields, passed a cliff’s edge, and the grave itself. Their three-fold
stare is a braided rope around fascism’s throat pulling tighter. Tighter. Tighter.
[Boudica: Daughters and Warfare]
Hold the men who desecrated Your daughters by the shorthairs, make them know
Your people can summon death without a short sword. Paint Your face! Loose Your
burning hair! Mount Your chariot, oh Warrior Goddess! With Your infantry rides
one thousand black hungry hounds. Hang Your garland of Roman heads from
Your hips to remind them You are both Creator and Destroyer.
[Ruby McCollum: Wealth and Executioners]
Extolled is the woman who shoots straight between the eyes of rapists! Extolled is she
who aims with two eyes open! Place your bets, name your numbers, my money rests
in the hands of a woman burned by a thousand needle pricks. Now the doctor’s evils are
spikes driven through fleshy temples. Bite down on their gag order and claims of paramour.
Grind the word to grit. Put on Your finest clothes, dress in yellow. We go to a funeral today.
[Timoclea: Wells and Stones]
What sound does a skull make against the bottom of a well? Let me whisper to
the boulders You lift to Your breast, I will tell them where to strike. This war-man
has made battleground of your skin and now you are a Divine David, making pebbles
against the ribcage of this tiny Goliath. What a giant You must seem from so far
below. Bend an ear, listen for the breaking of rocks and the following silence.
[Celia: Fire and the Hearth]
The crack of bones are cathedral bells singing the time in the dark, marking the Holy
convocation of sticks and stones. Your adolescent hands are smelted to hair-triggers.
Robert Newsom goes in pieces, and now You are between a rock and a burning place.
Break his largest pieces under Your girl-heel, turn him to dust. The flames form
a stepladder reaching up to an ethereal plane and now, to touch You is to combust.
[Bathsheba: Widows and Kings]
How thin our gossamer peace to be torn by Man-Eyes. How delicate our skin
to break under the hands of weak men. How Holy our womb to birth nations.
How Glorious, how powerful Your name for Leonard Cohen to invoke the
baffled king and only call You Her. How strong our hands to hold so
much fury, the small bodies of babes, and murdered husbands.
[Saartji Baartman: Curves and the Exploited]
I gasped when I saw You, not with the erotic disgust of Euro-eyes, but recognition.
A familiarity in our shapes. They molded You into a sideshow so they could lust
after You with no shame. When death took You, they bisected Your parts and sold
Your favored ones in jars. Commodified, even in death. Let me venerate You, sweet
Venus. Stand before me, a mirror, and I will speak love into us both.
[Sappho: Poets and Love]
Recite to me verses dressed up in iambics, make me Your acolyte for I too rejoice in the
curvatures and brilliance of women. You are the silver-haired Aphrodite aged like ambrosia,
dawned in ancient pearls, performing poems with a voice like caresses. Let us sing the glory
of growing old and I shall wash Your feet, dry them with my hair. Great Teacher and Lover
of Ladies grant us your wit, your fervor for a Woman’s World in the face senile men.
[Henrietta Lacks: Time and Medicine]
Look through the eons and see the many justifications for Your eternal violation,
recited by white men in white coats. You are a clock with no face, and we cannot tell
from where your tears flow. Let me retrieve these precious things, arrange them on Your altar,
for You hold miracles in Your matter. You are the ever multiplying and immortal Madonna,
imparting vitality from beyond the veil, constantly creating. Close Your eyes. Breathe. Rest.
