the world belongs to the brave

Judy Grahn (born 1940) is an American poet with a strong axis on female and lesbian experiences. She has been involved in the establishment of bookstores and publishing houses focusing solely on female and/or gay literature. Grahn is co-director and core faculty of the Women’s Spirituality MA program which started at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Palo Alto, California in September 2008. She is also editor of the online academic journal Metaformia.

Her monolithic poem A Woman is talking to Death, written 1972, is a brutal documentation of the  political atmosphere and devastating helplessness of minority groups in the American (I dare say Western) society only a few decades ago.

Here it will be posted piece-by-piece, you can find the other parts either through ping-back in the comments section (for parts posted later), through the links (for parts posted earlier), or just simply by making a search for “A Woman is Talking to Death” in the bottom of the right-hand sidebar.

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Two

They don’t have to lynch the women anymore

death sits on my doorstep
cleaning his revolver
death cripples my feet and sends me out
to wait for the bus alone,
then comes by driving a taxi.

the woman on our block with 6 young children
has the most vacant of eyes
death sits in her bedroom, loading
his revolver

they don’t have to lynch the women
very often anymore, although
they used to—the lord and his men
went through the villages at night, beating &
killing every woman caught
outdoors.
the European witch trials took away
the independent people; two different villages
—after the trials were through that year—
had left in them, each—
one living woman:
one

What were those other women up to? had they
run over someone? stopped on the wrong bridge?
did they have teeth like
any kind of geese, or children
in them?

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A Woman is Talking to Death, Part 1: Testimony in trials that never got heard

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◊ Alex