links & Audre Lorde

[glass_icarus]

+ such_heights's Female Character Trope Fest is up and running!
+ Via rydra_wong, jmtorres's A DNA TRIPLE HELIX MAKES NO SENSE made me laugh and laugh.
+ azuire posted お知らせ: الإسلام, which seems to be part of the Frequently (Or Not So Frequently) Asked Questions project (dingsi has a masterlist)? In any case, it's a cool project! I'm excited for 3W4DW. :)

Poems for today:

What My Child Learns of the Sea

What my child learns of the sea
Of the summer thunder
Of the bewildering riddle that hides at the vortex of spring
She will learn in my twilight
And childlike
Revise every autumn.

What my child learns
As her winters fall out of time
Ripened in my own body
To enter her eyes with first light.

This is why
More than blood,
Or the milk I have given
One day a strange girl will step
To the back of a mirror
Cutting my ropes
Of sea and thunder and sun.
Of the way she will taste her autumns
Toast-brittle, or warmer than sleep
And the words she will use for winter
I stand already condemned.

Oaxaca

Beneath the carving drag of wood
The land moves slowly.
But lightning comes.

Growing their secret in brown earth
Spread like a woman
Daring
Is weary work for still-eyed men
Who break the earth, nurse their seed,
And a hard watching through the dry season.
Yet, at the edge of bright, thin day—
Past the split plow—they look
To the hills—to the brewing thunder
For the storm is known.

The land moves slowly.
Though the thunder's eye
Can crack with a flash
The glass-brittle crust of a mountain's face,
The land moves slowly.
All a man's strength and in his son's arms
To carve one sleeve into rock-defiant earth
And the spread land waits.

Slow, long, the plowing
Through dry-season brown,
And the land moves slowly.

But lightning comes.

-- Audre Lorde

And now I must disappear again to finish Remix! (Well, that and work, obviously.) o/