by Alice Walker
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
Preface
I Can Worship You
I Can Worship You
The Love of Bodies
All the Toys
Poem for Aneta Chapman on Her 33rd Birthday
The Same as Gold
My Friend Calls
My Friend Calls
Coming Back from Seeing Your People
Someone I Barely Know
Despite the Hunger
My African
How Different You Are
New House Moves
New House Moves
Trapdoors to the Cellar Spring-Grass Green
Whiter Than Bone
Even When I Walked Away - i
Red Petals Sticking Out - ii
Inside My Rooms - iii
Let Change Play God
Refrigerator Poems
i
ii
iii
Just at Dusk
The Moment I Saw Her
A Native Person Looks up from the Plate
The Anonymous Caller
I Was So Puzzled by the Attacks
At First, It Is True, I Thought There Were Only Peaches & Wild Grapes
May 23, 1999
Reverend E. in Her Red Dress
All the People Who Work for Me & My Dog Too
All the People Who Work for Me & My Dog Too
The Snail Is My Power Animal
In Everything I Do
The Writer’s Life
Grace
Loss of Vitality
Until I Was Nearly Fifty
Thanks for the Garlic
Thanks for the Garlic
The New Man
What Will Save Us
My Friend Arrived
Dead Men Love War
Dead Men Love War
Thousands of Feet Below You
Living off of Isolated Women
They Made Love
To Be a Woman
To Be a Woman
Thanksgiving
The Last Time I Left Our House
I Loved You So Much
Winning
Falling Bodies
Falling Bodies
Why the War You Have in Mind (Yours and Mine) Is Obsolete
Projection
When You Look
The Tree
The Tree
The Climate of the Southern Hemisphere
Where Is That Nail File? Where Are My Glasses? Have You Seen My Car Keys?
My Ancestors’ Earnings
My Ancestors’ Earnings
My Friend Yeshi
Ancestors to Alice
One of the Traps
Not Children
Not Children
You Can Talk
Goddess
Why War Is Never a Good Idea
The Award
The Award
Though We May Feel Alone
When We Let Spirit Lead Us
Dream
We Are All So Busy
The Backyard, Careyes
The Backyard, Careyes
Practice
Dreaming the New World in Careyes
Patriot
Because Light Is Attracted to Dark
When Fidel Comes to Visit Me
When Fidel Comes to Visit Me
No Better Life
Someone Should Have Taught You This
Dream of Frida Kahlo
My Mother Was So Wonderful
Aging
Aging
Some Things to Enjoy About Aging
Lying Quietly
Wrinkles
Life Is Never Over
Bring Me the Heart of María Sabina
If They Come to Shoot You
You Too Can Look, Smell, Dress, Act This Way
The Breath of the Feminine
Relying on neither ...
Bring Me the Heart of María Sabina
About the Author
Also by Alice Walker
Copyright Page
Para “El Chinito” Guillermo, and to the blessed Feminine in us all
Let’s admit it. We women are building a motherland; each with her own plot of soil eked from a night of dreams, a day of work. We are spreading this soil in larger and larger circles, slowly, slowly. One day it will be a continuous land, a resurrected land come back from the dead. Mundo de la madre, psychic motherworld, coexisting and coequal with all other worlds. This world is being made from our lives, our cries, our laughter, our bones. It is a world worth making, a world worth living in, a world in which there is a prevailing and decent wild sanity.
—Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D.
Preface
Most of these poems were written at Casa Madre, our ochre red house, my daughter’s and mine, on the central coast in Mexico. I had moved out of the large white room with veranda looking toward the Pacific and into what is usually a guest bedroom. Smaller, darker, quieter; less yang, far, far more yin. It was shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon; I was feeling a deep sadness about the events and an incredible weariness that once again whatever questions had been raised were to be answered by war. Each morning, after sitting for half an hour, I wrote several poems. This was something of a surprise, since I had spent the past couple of years telling my friends I would probably not be writing anything more. What will you do instead? one of them asked. I would like to become a wandering inspiration, I replied. I had an image of myself showing up wherever people gathered to express their determination to have a future or to celebrate the present, speaking, reading, playing one of my very simple musical instruments, and just being around. I did not think I needed to offer much more than this. I still don’t. It is the best that I have and the easiest to give. Still, obviously, life had more writing for me in mind—if poems can actually be called writing. I have now written and published six volumes of poetry since my first collection, written while I was a student and published in 1968. From that first volume to this, what remains the same is the sense that, unlike “writing,” poetry chooses when it will be expressed, how it will be expressed, and under what circumstances. Its requirements for existence remain mysterious. In its spontaneous, bare truthfulness, it bears a close relation to song and to prayer. I once told someone I could not have written my novel The Temple of My Familiar with straightened hair. I could not have written these poems in a bright sunny room where there were no shadows.
What many North Americans lost on September 11 is a self-centered innocence that had long grated on the nerves of the rest of the world. With time, more of this innocence will be shed, and this is not a bad thing. With compassion for our ignorance, we might still learn to feel our way among and through shockingly unfamiliar and unexpected shadows. To discover and endure a time of sorrow, yes, but also of determination to survive and thrive, of inspiration and of poems. The adventures one encounters will, of necessity, have a more risk-filled depth.
In my mid-fifties I devoted a year to the study of plant allies, seeking to understand their wisdom and to avail myself of the aid to insightful living that I believe the earth provides as surely as do meditation centers. I also wished to understand the ease with which so many in our Western culture become addicted: to drugs, to food, to sex, to thinness. What are we lacking that we so predictably can be sold all manner of harmful material in an effort to make up for it? I was particularly interested in discovering what our children are seeking when they turn to drugs and alcohol. Three times during the year I gathered in a circle with other women and a shaman
and her assistant and drank ayuascha, a healing medicine used for thousands of years by the indigenous peoples of our hemisphere. Ayuascha is known as “the vine of the soul” and is considered holy. With this assessment I completely agree; I remain awed by my experiences. Several times I gathered with both women and men for the eating of mushrooms, called by the people who use them for healing “flesh of the gods.” For my final communication with the spirits of the plant world, at least in this form, I journeyed to the Amazon, home of “Grandmother” Ayuascha, where she herself instructed me I need look no further in her mirror; what she’d shown me already was enough.
As I see it, this is the work of the apprentice elder: to travel to those realms from which might come new (or ancient) visions of how humans might live peacefully and more lovingly upon the earth. I learned a lot, some of it fairly obvious. Our children take addictive drugs partly to allay their fears about what begins to look like a severely compromised future, one filled with hatred and with war. They take drugs to feel less lonely in a world that consistently chooses “profit” over community. But the most fundamental reason they take drugs, many of them, is the desire to have a religious or spiritual or ecstatic and trans-formative experience, a need hardwired into our being. Until relatively recently—the last five hundred years or so—most of our people had rituals during which they used all manner of inebriants to connect them with the divine. No one had invented a system to make money off of making others intoxicated. Nor were there laws forbidding the use of sacred plants used in healing and in ceremony—laws that, in the United States, have had a soul-killing effect on the native peoples whose connection to the infinite for thousands of years centered around the eating of mushrooms and particularly of peyote. I returned to my “ordinary” magical life much changed, and much the same, but deeply respectful of all our ancestors and their great inquisitiveness about, and belief in, the universe around them.
It was during these travels, internal ones and external ones, that I became aware of María Sabina, whose beloved face appears near the poem that invokes her name. Shaman, healer, priestess of the mushrooms, she was a legend in Mexico even while alive. Today she remains passionately revered, respected, loved, because she dedicated her life to the health and happiness of all humans. Whatever she is smoking will be used to cure whichever patient might be lying before her. She may receive a vision of what the illness is, or she may blow smoke over the sick person, purifying them and everything they touch. A poor Mazatec Indian from the mountains of Oaxaca, she has left a legacy of an amazing freedom, the foundation of which is absolute trust in the goodness of the earth; in its magic, in its love of us humans, in its ever present assistance the moment we give ourselves, unconditionally, into its wonder.
Woman who thunders am I, woman who sounds am I,
Spiderwoman am I, hummingbird woman am I,
Eagle woman am I,
Whirling woman of the whirlwind am I,
Woman of a sacred enchanted place am I,
Woman of the shooting stars am I.
—María Sabina1
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Wendy Weil, Kate Medina, and
Jessica Kirshner for all their thoughtfulness
and help.
I Can Worship You
I Can Worship You
I can worship
You
But I cannot give
You everything.
If you cannot
Adore
This body.
If you cannot
Put your lips
To my
Clear water.
If you cannot
Rub bellies
With
My sun.
The Love of Bodies
Dearest One
Of flesh
& bone
There is in
My memory
Such a delight
In the recent feel of your warm body;
Your flesh, and remembrance of the miracle
Of bone,
The structure of
Your sturdy knee.
The softness of your belly
Curves
My hand;
Your back
Warms me.
Your tush, seen bottomless,
Is like a small,
Undefended
Country
In which is grown
Yellow
Melons.
It is such a blessing
To be born
Into these;
And what a use
To put
Them to.
To hold,
To cherish,
To delight.
The tree next door
Is losing
Its body
Today. They are cutting
It down, piece
By heavy piece
Returning,
With a thud,
To
The earth.
May she know peace
Eternal
Returning to
Her source
And
That her beauty
Lofty
Intimate
With air
& fog
Was seen
And bowed to
Until this
Transition.
I send love
And gratitude
That Life
Sent you
(And her)
To spend
This time
With me.
After the bombing of 9/11, September 25, 2001
All the Toys
You have all
The toys
& you keep them
To yourself.
Every once
In a while
Each hundred
Years
Or so
A few of us
Get a toy or two
& go skimming about the earth
Just like
You do.
But we feel
Foolish
Out there
In the blue sea
The crisp
White boat
Listing, lost
For all the world
To see.
We drift
Aimless
Just
Like you
Wondering
If toys is all
There is
To this game
Still wondering
As you seem
To
With all your
Toys
When will our ship
Come in.
Poem for Aneta Chapman on Her 33rd Birthday
It’s you
Who taught her
To read
She says
With soft eyes
Telling me
One
Of the many reasons
She cherishes
You.
Following her gaze
Into the past
I see two
Small
Sweet
Dark hands
Clasped
Two hooded
Tiny heads
Four
Ashy little
Legs
Bravely crossing
The wintry
Streets
Of Cleveland, Ohio
Destination:
Library.
You pause
At every corner
The littler hand
Secure
In your scarcely
Larger one.
Be careful
You say
With gentle
Emphasis.
We must wait
For the green light.
Aries
Holding on
To Cancer:
The one who
Leaps upon the world
Held safe
By
The one
Who
Stays home
To mind
The hearth.
Today
It is
Still
Your warm
Sure hand
She trusts
Your shy smile
That makes
Her happy
Your face
In the largest
Room
That
Makes her
Feel safe
Not alone.
You are the sister
The big
Sister
As hero.
The one who sees
The one who listens
The one who guides
Teaches
& protects.
The one who
Sacrifices
The one whose
Sure reward
Is love.
Dear Aneta,
The world
Of women
Would be
Hopeless
Without sisters
Like you.
We would go
Hungry
We would be
Empty
We would be
Cold
Shaky on our
Small, unsure legs
Without
Big sisters
Like you.
Your presence
In our
World
Is like
The sun
Warming us.
Like the
Blossoming trees
Feeding us
With the beauty
Of your willingness
To endure
To love us
Unconditionally
To give.
And so
On this day
That you
Reach the age
When mystics
& revolutionaries
Strike out
Into the
Wilderness
To begin
Their
Ministries
To a broken
World
& wise women
Quietly support
& champion
The beloved spirits
In their midsts
I salute
You
With love
& appreciation.
Thank you
For
Your patient
Loving
