When One Woman Tells Her Truth, It

I Am Uncomfortable With Talking Of Poetry As A Priestly Profession, Because I Have Little Use For Organized Religions And Priestly Hierarchies. They Have Demoralized, Persecuted, So Many, Including Women, Gays, Non-believers.

We See Daily That Our Lives Are Terrible And Little, Without Continuity, Buyable And Salable At Any Moment, Mere Blips On A Screen, That This Is The Way We Live Now. Memory Marketed As Nostalgia; Terror Reduced To Mere Suspense, To Melodrama.

My Heart Is Moved By All I Cannot Save: So Much Has Been Destroyed I Have To Cast My Lot With Those Who Age After Age, Perversely, With No Extraordinary Power, Reconstitute The World.

I Believe That Words Can Help Us Move Or Keep Us Paralysed, And That Our Choices Of Language And Verbal Tone Have Something - A Great Deal - To Do With How We Live Our Lives And Whom We End Up Speaking With And Hearing; And That We Can Deflect Words By Trivialization, Of Course, But Also By Ritualized Respect, Or We Can Let Them Enter Our Souls And Mix With The Juices Of Our Minds.

Can Individual Psychic Wounds Really Heal In An Abusive And Fragmented Society? Audre Lorde Has A Poem Which Begins, "what Do We Want From Each Other/ After We Have Told Our Stories?" Where Do We Go To Explore Our Stake With Others In Such A Society?