On the occasion of Virginia's birthday
I was nineteen when I first read Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, and I remember that these words of hers impacted me deeply. I carried this quote in journals for many years, but it wasn't until I was completing AROHO's Gift of Freedom Award Application in 2008 that I had the opportunity to revisit them. I so completely identified with that sense of stifled/stymied/repressed creativity--not just individually but generationally. At the same time, however, I felt powerfully that my mother and her foremothers had never had the luxury of sitting indoors. And I wanted to speak to that--to the struggle of working class and poor women of many races to honor their creative impulses in the midst of daily battles for survival. This poem is in honor of my mother and Virginia Woolf, as unlike as their worlds may have been, for all the ways they've inspired me.
i come from women illiterate and rough-skinned
Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time, the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics. ~Virginia Woolf
i come from women illiterate and rough-skinned all their creativity
bent to the tasks of survival
enslaved women conquered women
who watched the world they knew die mute and screaming silent
and weeping women whose lives were worn short abandoned
women violated women
fractured women who nightly mended
themselves with threads of faith and resistance and endurance
women who toiled in fields picked cotton shelled corn milked
cows and goats collected eggs hunted and skinned and
disemboweled the meat served at the table
women who nurtured
babies in their wombs embraced them buried them women who
made walls with their own hands who sewed and washed and cared
for the sick women who took in laundry cleaned houses cared
for the children of others
women who prayed on their knees prayed on
their feet prayed working living dying
i come from women who never sat indoors
my mother was a silent mother she died with a thousand songs
unsung a thousand canvases still blank a thousand stories unwritten
my mother died the chemotherapy and radiation fueled a fire
that burned from the inside ravaging her skin
and as she lost her
vision she told me when she closed her eyes it felt like she was flying
over greening valleys the blue peaks of mountains in the distance
incandescent forests alive with color
no one knew my mother
was an artist she would draw me pictures when i was little i remember
a woman.s profile with short curls and a heart-shaped necklace a flock
of seagulls ocean waves on a cloudy day birthday cakes on birthday
cards she could only sign her name until she learned to write
Happy Birthday carving one letter at a time
my mother was an artist she made
blankets to keep us warm she made tortillas and meals that nurtured
a family of ten she was a gardener who made
the hard earth blossom
my mother was a mystic she dreamt god without
a face she dreamt the pure energy of the universe she learned
to meditate without knowing the word she was a healer who learned
to listen to her hands her intuition
even in dying my mother was my teacher
what terrible force their longing still exerts volcanoes of longing
hurricanes of longing deserts of longing
to create to be free
to speak their truths and own their own bodies their own voices
for millennia
their frustration like rotted seeds has left a dark stain and the earth
shudders takes them in
these fiery phantoms restless
and relentless unrealized unweeping unresigned
burning in my blood in the blood
of women like me the children of silent mothers who dream
of freedom haunted by longing
running between
working and caretaking
their longing and ours taken root
in our soul rising through the earth of our lives branching
and leafing and blossoming as we write and sing and dance and
breathe and dream
raw and spontaneous bursting weeping
healing our lives
--ire’ne lara silva
ire’ne lara silva lives in Austin , TX . Her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies, most recently in Acentos Review, Pilgrimage, and Yellow Medicine Review. She is the 2008 recipient of the Gloria Anzaldua Milagro Award, a Macondista, and an inaugural CantoMundo Fellow. ire'ne is the author of two chapbooks: ani’mal and INDíGENA. Her first collection of poetry, furia, was published in October 2010 by Mouthfeel Press and received an Honorable Mention for the 2011 International Latino Book Award in Poetry. She is also Co-Coordinator for the Flor de Nopal Literary Festival.
Website: http://www.irenelarasilva.webs.com
