If you find your true voice, bring it to
the land of the dead. There is kindness
in the ashes. And terror in non-identity.
A little girl lost in a ruined house,
this fortress of my poems.
I write with the blind malice of children
pelting a madwoman, like a crow,
with stones. No—I don’t write:
I open a breach in the dusk
so the dead can send
messages through.
What is this job of writing? To steer by
mirror-light in darkness. To imagine
a place known only to me. To sing
of distances, to hear the living notes
of painted birds on Christmas trees.
My nakedness bathed you in light.
You pressed against my body
to drive away the great
black frost of night.
My words demand the silence
of a wasteland.
Some of them have hands that grip
my heart the moment they’re written.
Some words are doomed like lilacs
in a storm. And some are like the
precious dead—even if I still prefer
to all of them the words for the
doll of a sad little girl.
–by Alejandra Pizarnik
@ Poetic Outlaws
