#lydia flores
There are overcast days - few and far between, thankfully - when poetry seems a futile pursuit. While the world strains & cracks, the belief that poetry cannot effect change hovers in my peripheries. This is, of course, the antithesis of our mission, and in the future, when I begin to doubt, I’ll be happy to have this feature bookmarked. Lydia Flores’ writing is a swift kick in the pants - a compelling reminder of the personal and political power of poetry. It’s Required Reading for any poet who has ever felt disillusionment trickling in!
-Wilson Josephson, Assistant Poetry Editor
Where I found Power… in your wallet, in your heart or both….
My mother died on November 18th 2004 and unlike most things you would find in a dead person’s wallet– pictures of children, grandchildren, spouse, whatever, photo ID, credit cards, and cash– a poem was found. I wrote a poem about where I saw myself in fifteen years, I was about 12 when I wrote it. And I suppose that poem held some type of truth or obscure significance because why else would my mother keep that poem in her wallet? That poem found its resting place in every wallet she had, in every purse she carried and went with her everywhere she went. Some poetry brings you to the ocean and leaves you like the waves at the shore with a sweet memory, and some poetry brings you to the war and leaves you with wounds of truth and a change inside.
I decided that if I was going to write poetry, I was going to write poems that people can keep in their wallets, in their pockets, in their hearts… I was / I’m going to write poems that people never forget, like a war wound. My mother has long been dead, I miss her terribly, but she’s not here to read my words and, because they mean something, do something with them…carry them. Other people are here to do it though.
I probably can’t say that I’ve become any or are doing/have done any of things I wrote in that poem. What I can say is that I failed and I am failing, I’m still trying, but most of all I’m writing and my poems are still scratchy in their throat. For so long all I could do was scream inside, inside the privacy of my own conscious and notebook pages, because nobody or if any, not many will hear them because It’s a, female, black mouth.
I had to and have to remind myself, when I feel like giving up on writing, that I planted one poem and that poem bloomed in my mother’s heart– that she kept with her, like a pressed flower–How many more can I plant even if I never get to see them bloom? Because they won’t always show me their garden hearts or I’ll be dead before I get to see them. Yet from time to time that reminder fades in and out because how can I be the black honest, passionate- whatever have you- gardener and not the angry black girl shouting with a garden rake in her hands, that the world sees? How can I write those beautiful poems that keep returning like the waves at the shore and be, female, black? I’m still trying to figure it out. And not being white/ male/ or whatever else that’s not black or what America calls for, makes it seem impossible. It makes writing, writing poems, speaking, and/or just being, dangerous.
I believe poetry to be power and I will continue to write poems that intend to make a home in people’s wallets, pockets, in people’s hearts. But I can’t be Walt Whitman and a black female. I can’t be Sylvia Plath and black. Maya Angelou is dead, Gwendolyn Brooks is dead and it’s the same war, which has gotten more grittier. My body is like a gamble and no matter how many wallets my poems end up in, I’ll never get to take off this funeral dress so while I’m here, I might as well write well in it and die with have written well in it, praying that my poems are powerful enough to be remembered… even when they forget my name and black face.
I will always be what I am to the world, but my poetry is and will be more than what the world sees me as. The wallets, the pockets, even the rooms, and the hearts my poems may end up in will always be more important than me because poetry is more than just my pen to paper signed with my name. Poetry is more than what this world sees the author as, more than stereotypes, metaphors, and beautiful language or whatever else. Poetry is a catalyst, it is rain, it is truth, it is hope, it is bigger than these little words. Poetry…it is power.
