My Waking Dream of Questions
Diane Gilliam
MY WAKING DREAM OF THE QUESTIONS
For Alexis de Veaux, and the Hobart Festival of Women Writers
I’m having trouble remembering now
the title of the panel, how many Black women
sitting at the front table how many White
and neither could I say how many of each
in the chairs facing them but many
of each not the usual dearth
of dark faces and one of the younger
Black women on the panel says
I don’t have time for someone who wants
to write about her garden she says it in all
truth and urgency without question
and at the end of her talk
what comes back to her is not a question
but a challenge I have to challenge you
on that says a middle-aged White woman standing
at the back of the room behind the rows
of chairs I have to defend a woman’s right
to write about whatever she wants
to write about and the Black woman
says she is speaking to her own
priorities she has other
work to do and I am not remembering
her words exactly but I am doing
my best to be urgent and true and
another White woman stands up
at the back of the room I am one
of those women who wants to write
about her garden she says I find
it beautiful and I find meaning
there and I cannot see what
could be wrong with that
and again I am not remembering
her words exactly but I am
telling you true as I can
and the air in the room
got very stiff and bodies
stiffened breathing it in as if
everyone knew already the kind
of pain that was coming and
no one wanted it to come
but there was some kind
of answer already in each body in each
chair and there is a kind of finality
to answers something that can’t
be taken back and just when it all
could have come to grief
the wise woman asks a question
could we turn out the lights she says
and someone does and she tells us
to feel the dark to breathe it in it isn’t very dark
but the harshness from the overhead lights
was gone from the room a harshness
gone and the bodies in the chairs
soften a bit the air softens and
ask your questions the wise woman says
whatever they are and the bodies in the chairs
seem to turn inward to look for what
their questions really are and I wish
I could tell you now what questions
they found I am not remembering
this part but I can tell you true the room
opened from the inside out
questions bloomed in that room
like a garden that has been held back
by bad weather too much sun not
enough water suddenly given
what it needed all along which was work
work we could do without hurting
each other the work of knowing
differently knowing each one by what
she did not know knowing ourselves
by what we did not know
and that other light the one
that the wise woman had asked us
to turn off we left it off
as we left that room
our way back into the world
lit as it was
by questions
CAIM
Circling prayers, also known as Caim prayers (from the Irish gaelic meaning 'protection'), are used to create a ring of safety around one's self ...
I like to think of the moon
as the Great Round at a remove
now from the way she used to hold
us all inside us and all the things
of the world until we came
in our understanding to believe
that we were different
from all the things and all the things
different from each other and we among
ourselves also so different and apart
and maybe she thought to let us
go at that point but mother that she is
she stays around her soft light a reminder
that she is one thing sometimes yellow
white orange blood harvest
shadows’ hollows showing on her face—
the dark side insisting on itself
one thing
one state
of being holding us all
in her endless encircling
her mother face hovering
over our beds in the night
our light
left on in the hallway
our one thing
LONG BEFORE
Long before the days of searching
the mirror for clues, and taking stock
of other people’s faces when I came
into a room; before commercials
had anything to do with me
and magazines were for cutting up
for collages of food groups or shapes
or colors; before that
dressing down by the art teacher
and the girls who passed
for friends but were nobody
I even liked, before all that
nonsense, I wrote
my first novel. I must have been
nine or ten, because I remember clearly
the thick bic pen cursive on wide-ruled
notebook paper, writing on both sides--
and third grade was when we learned
to write that way. It was about a girl,
an indentured servant, who got away
and along the way met another girl,
different, and in a different
kind of danger, and they got away
together. And whoever they asked
for help, miraculously, helped them.
And when my mother knocked
on my bedroom door to see
what I was doing, I opened the door
just a crack, and waggled
the pile of pages I was making
at her and told her no,
I didn’t want to go outside
and play with Karen.
I was writing.
