Black Strawberry

afrodiaspores:

“The Two Elizas,” 2009, by poet and photographer Rachel Eliza Griffiths

(after ‘Two Fridas,’ 1939)

Be near me & tell
where the blood is going.

Too often bull-bellied clouds slow
drag our hips, fracturing
both girl & woman.

Barbed ideals conjoin
& coil their righteous dreams through
arteries, thick as autumn vines

that keep light out.  And I must take
my own hand, must hold my own
hand, as if it were a stave of notes

scattered from a razed moon: brokenly beating
the rhythm of a thousand-throated
hummingbirds beneath a dress of tulle.

      Listen to us: these women
      say to ourselves:  Eliza:  Eliza.

The men have left & in a dusky corner
the women you have been
are piled like a beige heap of slips
to be ironed & mended, hung.

All mothers have left you
& in their shadows blood
drips from the chandelier
to the floor where your body
rocks in its cradle.

Eliza: you: Eliza: me.

      Which if I’m answering
           each of you

      there’s light in my lungs
      where screams are smeared

I wear golden lamps
that open after midnight.

Four lips of light opening towards
testament & earth.  Our imagination
                                        & plague. 

     The things that hold.           
          Hold me now     
     before I am no more 
                       of a fragment
      than the clouds behind me.

The body expands
its luminous stain. 

Melancholic now, one Eliza.
Inconsolable: you: the Others. 

Be near me & tell
us where the blood is going. 

Be near me & tell Beauty
I was once unbearable.

For Elizabun.

265 notes
Reblogged from deliciouskaek.
0riginally posted by afrodiaspores.
Posted 1 year ago on Thursday 5 April 12.

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• #“The Two Elizas”
• #Rachel Eliza Griffiths
• #queue