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Poems
in Conversation and a Conversation
by
Elizabeth Alexander & Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
2008,
27 pages
Elizabeth
Alexander
"The
Black Woman Speaks"
I am
thirty-five and the love of my life,
and my great work, and my three sons,
and
my new nation are ahead of me. Good-bye, Chicago.
About to set out for the
territory, Mexico,
for the rest of the century and into the next.
My
sense of my people will strengthen and shift.
But first I had to leave
D.C. You have to leave D.C.,
lovely colored town that will make a colored girl
smile
but not stretch or growl or frown
with the exertion of thinking,
WORK.
Yet there I made my first carving
from a cake of Ivory soap, at
Dunbar High School.
There I was taught. There I stood
in front of the
United States Supreme Court
with a noose around my neck, protesting lynching.
There
I realized I had a debt I had not paid.
I am black because my great-great
grandmother
was kidnapped on a beach in Madagascar.
In Mexico, I will
carve black woman's bodies and heads
from reddish stone and black stone.
Some
will be massive and the work will make me sweat.
The black woman's head is
a massive weight.
The black woman's head holds the black woman' brain.
The
black woman's body holds the black woman's head.
The black woman's work
is the work of the world.
Lyrae
Van Clief-Stefanon
"Bop:
The North Star" Polaris
sits in the sky and if I knew
which one it was I could follow it all the way
to
Auburn. Oh, Harriet, who did not need the poise
of freedom knocked into your
head like sense, who found it more
than possible to sleep, pistol shoved deep
into your pocket
along this route, I cannot tell a dipper from Orion.
Yes,
the springtime needed you. Many a star was waiting
for yor eyes only. The
univerity twinkles on the hill above my house.
The fat moon rises and a girl
holds out her arms. She twirls
in a blue Polly Flinders dress. Mama's precious
cameo
— a white woman's silhouette on black satin ribbon
choker tied around her neck.
Poise begins here:
in cinders, in rhyme, in splintering beauty into this
and
this —: the image at my throat: the summer's pitching
constellations: the ten
o'clock scholar's midnight lesson.
Yes, the springtime needed you. Many
a star was waiting
for yor eyes only. At the prison at Auburn
I cros the yard. Inmates whet tongues against
my body: cement-sculpted —:
poised for hate —: pitch compliments
like coins: —(wade) — their silver slickening
— (in the water) —:
uncollected change. A guard asks Think they're beautiful?
just wait
til they're out here stabbing each other. Oh, Harriet, the stars
throw
down shanks —: teach the sonnet's a cell —:now try to escape —
Yes,
the springtime needed you. Many a star was waiting
for yor eyes only.
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| Audio
Samples: |
Listen
to "The Black Woman Speaks"
As read by the author,
Elizabeth
Alexander
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Listen
to "Bop: The North Star"
As read by the author,
Lyrae
Van Clief-Stefanon
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| About
the Authors: |
Elizabeth
Alexander
is
a poet, essayist, playwright, and teacher. She is the author of four books of
poems, The Venus Hottentot, Body of Life, Antebellum Dream Book, and American
Sublime, which was one of three finalists for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. She
is also a scholar of African-American literature and culture and recently published
a collection of essays, The Black Interior. She has read her work across
the U.S. and in Europe, the Caribbean, and South America, and her poetry, short
stories, and critical prose have been published in dozens of periodicals and anthologies.
She has received many grants and honors, most recently the Alphonse Fletcher,
Sr. Fellowship for work that “contributes to improving race relations in American
society and furthers the broad social goals of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown
v. Board of Education decision of 1954,” and the 2007 Jackson Prize for Poetry,
awarded by Poets and Writers. She is a professor at Yale University, and for the
academic year 2007-2008 she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced
Study at Harvard University. Her website is www.elizabethalexander.net.
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Lyrae
Van Clief-Stefanon
is
the author of Open Interval (forthcoming, University of Pittsburgh Press)
and Black Swan (University of Pittsburgh Press), winner of the 2001 Cave
Canem Poetry Prize, as well as Poems in Conversation and a Conversation
(Slapering Hol), a chapbook in collaboration with Elizabeth Alexander. Her work
has appeared in such journals as African American Review, Callaloo, Crab Orchard
Review, Gulf Coast, and Shenandoah, and in the anthologies Bum Rush
the Page, Role Call, Common Wealth, Gathering Ground, and The Ringing Ear:
Black Poets Lean South. She is currently at work on a third collection, Southern
Gate. She teaches in the creative writing program at Cornell University.
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