A Response to Alice Walker: Did This Happen to your Mother?

https://aaregistry.org/poem/did-this-happen-to-your-motherdid-your-sister-throw-up-a-lot-by-alice-walker/

I. I love a man who is not worth my love

What strange comfort to know we have a shared sorrow--

desire that has sickened us curdled into self-loathing

a communal suffering

Connecting our two bodies

our billions of bodies of women

bodies acted upon by men

subject to millennia of grief

Although our worlds are divided by ravines of history, of generations,

of the color of the earth of our childhoods the color of our skin

My friend, my answer to you is that he is worth it

Treat him gently with your mind

for it is simultaneously illusion and enlightenment

when you are taken undertow by this madness

You see him most clearly now

with the greatest purity

you are privileged to know his true self: a god, a child, perfection

It may become blurred over time—

remote, clouded by distance or by habit

but now it is a throbbing truth, an epiphany, a state of grace

Do not let love diminish you but broaden the heart

let yourself to be consumed—

pained, raw, bloodied

Extend it, offer it up, make a sacrifice

from one beloved to all men

Allow your love for him to transform into a sacredness

an embrace of humanity

II.

There is no place in this life for love.

No room set aside for it no space where it is acceptable.

In this recipe of our daily routine: of working, eating, washing the body

exercising, feeding the child, walking the dog

entertaining ourselves, of weekdays and weekends in polite conversations

the mind has a path it must follow.

Thoughts are planned, feelings laid out in a logical path,

a sidewalk of concrete divided neatly in squares.

And yet this delicate intimacy

this humid desire

this sacred tenderness

as you say, they come up like weeds Weeds that protrude through the cracks –

shunned, shamed, illicit, unintended.

Invasive species, barbarians that have no place in civilized life

that cause disorder, that cannot be discussed that have to be chopped out, forced to wilt back that must be eradicated.

They contain inherent poisons

chemicals that degrade the foundation of the house

that cause our path to crumble

and set us back into wilderness.

Yet, they are true natives—

organic, products of the soil’s richness.

Their roots connect to the depth of the earth

below rock and river

to the pulsing heart

to the cherished center.