Lorna Dee Cervantes Quotes

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…

There's sky and death
shimmering the waves.

I was a street kid by day and by night I was a library kid. At the library I would go the shelves alphabetically. I was drawn to anyone with a female name, with a Latino or Spanish name. There were very, very few. But as a teenager I discovered African American poetry. Gwendolyn Brooks was the first. Then Phillis Wheatley. I really identified with this slave woman writing poetry to assert and affirm her humanity. Suddenly my eyes were open to history. There was a whole explosion of African-American women poets-Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, June Jordan. I have a poem in my head that's going to take me years to write down. Its working title is "On Thanking Black Muses." I owe them, because poetry really changed my life, saved it.

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

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

Things come to me, they speak to me. Stanley Kunitz has had an enormous impact on my life. He once said that poetry is only half language, the other half is a quality of perception, a function of the imagination, a particular form of paying attention. For me, it's a stilling of the self, waiting for this language to speak to me before I utter it.

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.

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

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

And late that night I tasted
the last of the sweet fruit, sucked the rich pit
and thought nothing of death.

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

Two hummingbirds, hovering, stuck to each other,
arcing their bodies in grim determination
to find what is good, what is
given them to find. These are warriors
distancing themselves from history.
They find peace
in the way they contain the wind
and are gone.

My palm cupped her mouth
As I kissed her, the flesh
Of my hand between us.

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