I love Poetry

I told Dionne Brand that she wrote this poem for me, and for my mother and now it is also for Tanya S.

I am not that strong woman

I am not that strong woman on the mountain
at Castle Bruce
the mountain squarely below her feet
the flesh bursting under her skin
I cannot hold a mountain under my feet,
she dug yams and birthed a cow
I am not the old one
Boxes on her head in Roseau
the metred street, she made one hundred turns in it
the pee streaming from her straddled legs
she stood over the gutter,
the hot yellow stream wet her ankles
and the street
nor the other one on church street
skirt tied around her waist
mad
some aged song shared her lips
for many years with a clay pipe.

I am the one with no place to live
I want no husband
I want nothing inside of me
that hates me
these are walls and niches
park benches and iron spikes
I want nothing that enters me
screaming
claiming to be history,
my skin hangs out on a clothes line
drying and eaten by the harsh sun
and the wind threatens to blow my belly
into a balloon
to hold more confusions,
alone is my only rescue
alone is the only thing I chose,

I'll gather my skin like a washerwoman
her hand insisting the wind out,
I will bare my teeth to the sun
let it feel
how it is to be dazzled.

Dionne Brand from "Chronicles of the Hostile Sun"