They think I am stronger than I am.
I would tell this like a story but
where a story should begin
I am left standing in silence.
There has to be someone to name you.
There must be hands to raise you sun-high,
old voices to sing you in, warm hands
to touch you about, ancient words
to bind you to your many selves,
gentle spirits with yucca whips waiting
as you learn to walk.
There has to be someone to name you.
The words have thundered in my body for thirty years.
Like amnesia, this way of being a fragment.
Unfired pottery with poster paint splashed on
to hide the crumbling cracking commonness
left in the storeroom for a tourist sale.
I will never be among them.
There has to be someone to name you.
I will choose the tongue for my songs ;
I am a young woman still ; joining hands with the moon.
I am a creature of blood and it's the singing
of the blood that matters, the singing of songs
for keeping thunder, of songs for hollowing out
mountains, of songs for awareness -- always -- of
someone else, of songs that starve not for food
but for being remembered.
There has to be someone to name you.
Aging with the rock of this ancient land I give myself
to the earth ; my red feet merge with the mesas
and root in this desert, balance like the rainbow
shaped in its dance, searching the sky for clouds.
Across asphalt canyons
waits a thirty-year old woman to be named.
(1979-1980)
Wendy Rose ... "academic squaw" (le terme est d'elle, ironique et précis) de la nation Hopi ; quelques éclaircissements sur la seconde strophe tirés du classique Book of the Hopi de Frank Waters, publié en 1963 (disponible en français : Le livre du hopi, aux éditions du Rocher) :
Pour les "gentle spirits with yucca whips", voir "kachina" (pas les poupées, les danseurs masqués) et ci-dessous :
Pour ce qui est des justes récriminations contre mon usage immodéré de la photocopieuse, voir ici, merci.
