Banner - Chrystos

Womyn

Chrystos describes herself as a Native American Lesbian poet and activist. Her writing is thoughtful and provocative, taking no quarter and making no compromises. Her poems range from funny to loving to angry (often all at the same time).


Three collections of her writings are:
Not Vanishing
Dream On
In Her I Am
 She also appears in many anthologies and journals.

Here are two poems from Dream On:


IN HER I AM
fine dark pulsing without time where I'm meant to be
Clear well fed no words calculating next move
No misunderstanding this muscle which breathes with my hand
enfolded hot as air vibrating in summer
Slurping my tongue is a cat feather river vortex
an angel night jasmine wind licking us clean
We're hurtling through stars becoming
here
as we so rarely are
Heavy with longing to stir ourselves from ember to embrace
Moaning with you so deeply in you I'm no more than air
to meet your need
Sobbing rocks fly through my heart in a river that breaks
down into my eyes where closed & black I am suddenly
red & searing hot rubies



WE CUT OFF OUR HAIR

as our children kill themselves at fourteen or seventeen
in mass explosions
one after another until ten or twenty-three
are dead
on one reservation after another
multiplied across our land
Breathing this colonized air they take poison
into their hearts listening for the message
of genocide so much easier when we do it to ourselves
& save whites the trouble
Grief cuts out our hearts & laughs
din of this cruel survival breath to breath
going on through this pain we know strips us
crushes us beneath bulldozers & booze
We pray for you our children
LIVE
Become the river of our continuing hoop
LIVE
Become the breath of our never silent drums
LIVE
Become the future red & remembered
LIVE
Become our voices singing up the sun
LIVE

From Dream On, Press Gang Publishers, 1991.

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