| My daughter plays on the floor |
| with plastic letters, |
| red, blue & hard yellow, |
| learning how to spell, |
| spelling, 5 |
| how to make spells. |
| |
| I wonder how many women |
| denied themselves daughters, |
| closed themselves in rooms, |
| drew the curtains 10 |
| so they could mainline words. |
| |
| A child is not a poem, |
| a poem is not a child. |
| there is no either/or. |
| However. 15 |
| |
| I return to the story |
| of the woman caught in the war |
| & in labour, her thighs tied |
| together by the enemy |
| so she could not give birth. 20 |
| |
| Ancestress: the burning witch, |
| her mouth covered by leather |
| to strangle words. |
| |
| A word after a word |
| after a word is power. 25 |
| |
| At the point where language falls away |
| from the hot bones, at the point |
| where the rock breaks open and darkness |
| flows out of it like blood, at |
| the melting point of granite 30 |
| when the bones know |
| they are hollow & the word |
| splits & doubles & speaks |
| the truth & the body |
| itself becomes a mouth. 35 |
| |
| This is a metaphor. |
| |
| How do you learn to spell? |
| Blood, sky & the sun, |
| your own name first, |
| your first naming, your first name, 40 |
| your first word. |
