I hear the singing of the lives of women. The clear mystery, the offering, and the pride. - Muriel Rukeyser

These are our strength, who strike against history.
These whose corrupt cells owe their new styles of weakness to our diseases;

these carrying light for safety on their foreheads
descended deeper for richer faults of ore,
drilling their death.

These touching radium and the luminous poison,
carried their death on their lips and with their warning
glow in their graves.

We are against war and the sources of war. We are for poetry and the sources of poetry. They are everyday, these sources, as the sources of peace are everyday, infinite and commonplace as a look, as each new sun.

Belief has its structures, and its symbols change. Its tradition changes. All the relationships within these forms are inter-dependent. We look at the symbols, we hope to read them, we hope for sharing and communication. Sometimes it is there at once, we find it before the words arrive, as in the gesture of John Brown, or the communication of a great actor-dancer, whose gesture and attitude will tell us before his speech adds meaning from another source. Sometimes it rises in us sleeping, evoked by the images of dream, recognized in the blood. The buried voices carry a ground music; they have indeed lived the life of our people. In times of perversity and stress and sundering, it may be a life inverted, the poet who leaps from the ship into the sea; on the level of open belief, it will be the life of the tribe. In subjugated peoples, the poet emerges as prophet.