Lorna Dee Cervantes Quotes

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.

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…

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

There's sky and death
shimmering the waves.

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

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

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…

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

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 ran
flushed and shadowed by no one
alone I settled stiff in mouth
with the words women gave me.

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.

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