Lorna Dee Cervantes Quotes

We knew, love, and that was all
we were ever offered.

I am not driven, so much, by intentions, as I am stunned into being by intent.

This is the conscience of trauma. This is a grief book. That's how I refer to it, privately. It's my grief book because my mother was murdered, and raped, and battered. Then they burned the house down. I was dealing with that and with my divorce, and all of that stuff When people ask me, do you believe that everybody can write poetry, in a certain sense, yes, in a certain sense, no. Not everybody can write poetry…

I come from a long line of eloquent illiterates
whose history reveals what words don't say.
Our anger is our way of speaking,
the gesture is an utterance more pure than word.

I started writing for the same reason I breathe-because I had to.

Reading African American women poets politicized me. And it was the fact that poetry politicized me that had to do with then saving my life. Then all of the sudden, I started questioning; that's the dynamic of oppression, and especially as a child and as a woman, a girl coming into it. You look around, and you don't see anybody like you in positions of power, and you don't even question it. You just assume that you are not going to achieve anything and [that] no one expects anything from you. And so when I started reading this poetry, then I started questioning and questioning real hard. And I got angry.

There's sky and death
shimmering the waves.

They spotlight those who walk
like a dream, with no one
waiting in the shadows
to palm them back to living.

And finally, it is me
only guessing at what secrets
or hatreds they share.

I have learned the serenity
of a mockingbird, the justice
of a crow, blue jay's strength;
I've dipped their feathers in blood
to seal the pact—my path.

In the years that separate,
in the tongues that divide
and conquer, in the love
that was a language
in itself, you never spoke,
never regret. Even
that last morning
I saw you with blood
in your eyes, blood
on your mouth, the blood
pushing out of you
in purple blossoms.

I intended all of that. And this is what I like about this, and drawings like draw, like the gunman. I call this the shoot out, the high noon draw. That was also my intent as well as drawings; draw a bucket back to the cables and the whole idea about drawings…

I am driven from this world, alive.
I come to this world, in dreams.

Our dreams wafted over the sullen skyline
like crazy meteors of flying embers:
a glow in the heart all night.

She would not be
silent and still.
She would live,
arrogantly,
having wrestled
her death
and won.