She Becomes Time
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About this ebook
Margaret Randall
Margaret Randall is a poet, feminist, photographer, oral historian, and social activist. She has lived in Mexico, Nicaragua, Cuba, and other Latin American countries. She is the author of more than 90 books of poetry, prose, oral testimony, and memoir, including, recently, Haydee Santamaria, Cuban Revolutionary: She Led by Transgression (2015), Che on My Mind (2014), and the poetry collections The Rhizome as a Field of Broken Bones (2013) and About Little Charlie Lindbergh (2014).
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She Becomes Time - Margaret Randall
heat.
First Family
To question everything. To remember what it has been forbidden even to mention. […] To look afresh at and then describe for ourselves, the frescoes of the Ice Age, the nudes of ‘high art,’ the Minoan seals and figurines, the moon landscape embossed with the booted print of a male foot, the microscopic virus, the scarred and tortured body of the planet Earth.
—Adrienne Rich²
One Memory Less Among the Weeds
If older sister had lived more than hours,
a lifetime or other circumstance,
I wouldn’t have a second-hand name
I cherish as my own.
If Grandpa hadn’t taken what wasn’t his
with Grandma looking on,
if salty and sweet hadn’t come
to the party with intent to confuse.
If the young Italian lover had closed
the bathroom door, an image
more relevant than Ivory soap,
one memory less among the weeds.
What if blue and green had always
danced with one another,
red and orange burst into flame
on the walls of a child’s room.
I cannot say if reading that passage at eight
about the concentration camp, then slamming
shut the book and furtively opening it again
was childhood curiosity or awe.
War was always huge, unknown and battering,
Bundles for Britain followed by marching
endlessly from there to here.
I carried placards, then thirty extra pounds.
If I hauled words in my firstborn’s diaper bag
or reinvented them
everywhere I stayed
more than a few exploratory months,
it was a complication born of poetry and war,
following a broken arrow
to weather, language,
and humor disguised as rice and beans.
In Vietnam I found broken clamshells
on a pontoon moving across a river
where bridges and bombs took turns
and I wore USA: trembling question mark.
I kept on moving, collecting teachers
and battlegrounds,
more children with open eyes,
their fathers hovering.
And then I stopped, embraced by the one
I was meant to find who was meant
to find me. I tell her these stories
night by night in a single breath.
Being their Daughter
It was the question without an answer.
Sometimes her silence
was gunmetal gray,
sometimes rimmed in orchid pink.
He didn’t know and didn’t want to know.
Like most couples, they had their problems.
Being their daughter
didn’t provide a clue.
DNA isn’t part of this story.
Each year I ask
in the voice of a younger me
and reap an answer of rainbows.
People always told me I had big bones
like him. My resemblance to her
stared back in every mirror.
They’re both gone now,
leaving me a story winding down,
repeating echoes
and resignation
transparent as morning sky.
Where I Live and Die
I am in the picture frame but look
as if I want out.
The relative behind the shutter
must have urged
come on now smile,
may have displayed impatience
at my lack of interest, refusal
to take my place in his tableaux.
Almost eight decades have passed.
The image is faded, edges frayed
beyond their pinked irregularity
defining that home album era.
I cannot remember what lay beyond
the picture plane,
what truth or action
social formality stole.
What I do know is what I longed for then
without knowing its name
I have grabbed with both hands
and pulled onto this map
where I live and die
along with all those
who invited me
inside looking in.
Like a Bull in a China Shop
I rise, astonished by air beneath my floating limbs,
buoyant dance of a body my father once said
was like a bull in a china shop: grade school
ballet recital yearning for grace.
Grace would never be my strong suite but
here I am skimming the top bookshelf
where poetry flashes before my eyes, pulling
my feet way up and in to avoid stubbed toes.
The platform chair rocks back and forth,
no one settled on its curved seat,
not even a ghost hiding its presence
to watch this carefree dance.
Faster and faster I race beneath a ceiling
threatening sudden stop, untouched,
propelled by some magical force:
three parts helium, one part abhorrence of war.
Pied Piper of love and logic, I sound the first
totally on-key melody of my life
and beckon the world to follow,
peace so much easier than this sad default.
Mother and the Mac Truck
Mother sat erect, her hands firmly
grasping ten and two
and always drove
a good twenty miles slower
than the speed limit,
which is why in my dream
I was surprised
she was speeding