Top 15 Lorna Dee Cervantes Quotes

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.

For me, poetry has been an exercise in freedom. Freedom is like a muscle-the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. Poetry can give you a sense of choice. It's free on every level. Language and memory have no price tags on them. You have limitless choices-in form, language, subject matter-that spill over into life.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

There's sky and death
shimmering the waves.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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