This poem is also from E-mails from Scheherazad.“
I always cry when I read this poem because it helps me remember that I am not what my abusers told me. Don’t forget to read “A Man Who Washes My Dishes” in the last post.
“Sacred Immortality”
You smashed my pottery
One day I began to glue it back together
and for that
You said I was a liar and a cheat
You took away my beauty
When I began to wipe off ugliness
You called it vanity
and said I looked like women of the street
You cut my guitar strings
When I pulled my own hairs off my head
so I could hear a few notes of redemptive grace,
you said my music was profanity
You say the devil is getting his hooks in me
I think the devil’s hooks have been in me a very long time
Thank God I’m pulling from my flesh
this satanic holiness
and inhaling with every breath
the oxygen of sacred immortality
1998
This poem is from pg. 60 of the Softcover University of Florida Edition