While I'm searching for the words...

While I'm searching for my own words to share with you, I wanted to mention a couple things. One is that I'm going through a transition in my life where I re-commit to who and what's important and try to find the faith to be comfortable within my own head, while having the courage to ask for help. (is that obfuscated enough?)

So last night I was flipping through an anthology culled from women's writing, putting together different images of spirituality. One piece included in the book is a short story by Helena Maria Viramontes called "The Moths." Now pretty much any Latina in academia (seems like) has a copy of Viramontes's The Moths and Other Stories and she has stories in there ("Cariboo Cafe" "Miss Clairol") that I read again and again. And yet it seems that I have never read "The Moths." I read it today and am truly grateful.

But because I need to end on a note of fierceness, I will share with you Becky Birtha's poem of fiercenss,


Mythology

You read us the words
you have written about
Demeter, Hecate, Diana.
When we no longer want to listen
you say--
But your people have myths of their own.
Why don't you find them out?
Why don't you write them down?
Why don't you bring them
for us to read?

Yes, we know that
our great-great-grandmothers
remembered many truths.
We also know
how those ancestors were
separated and sold
severed by the middle passage
disease, death
and design
so no two
women who spoke the same language
came to the same place.

To talk in the old tongues
was forbidden.
To learn to write
forbidden.
To sing the old stories
forbidden,
forbidden even
to speak secrets in
the sacred voice of the drum.

We live out our lives
in languages with no names
for the Goddesses
of our great-grandmothers,
no characters in which to inscribe
their wisdom,
no verbs that encompass
their power,
no constructions that can contain
their rage.

Yes, we will find them out.
As we uncover and claim those words
we may never choose to write them down.
We will not be bringing them
to you.