Monday, November 29, 2010

Reprieve

I've listened to Ani Difranco's performance of this poem enough in the past two days that I thought a transcription was warranted. Yes, others have put copies of this online... but those versions don't match the one that I've been listening to. And, admittedly, I wanted to write this out. Word for word.
The written version in no way holds a candle to the spoken word. Click on the title to listen.

Reprieve

Manhattan is an island

like the women who are

surrounded by children in a

car surrounded by cars


Or, Manhattan was a project

that projected the worst of mankind

first one, and then the other has made its mark on my mind


It’s sixty years later

near the hypocenter of the A-bomb

I’m in the middle of Hiroshima

watching a twisted, old eucalyptus tree wave

one of the very few lives that survived and lives on

remembering the day it was suddenly thousands of degrees in the shade


And what all of nature gave birth to

terror took in a blinding rage

with the kind of pain it would take cancer

so many years just to say


Oh, to grow up gagged and blind folded

a mans' world in your little girls’ head

the voice of the Great Mother drowned out in the constant

honking haunting of the car crash up ahead.


Oh, to grow up hypnotized

and then try to shake yourself awake

cuz you can sense what has been lost

cuz you can sense what is at stake


Yea, so it took me a few years to catch on

that those days I catch everyone’s eye

correspond with those nights of the month when

the moon gleams like an egg in the sky

and men are using a sense they didn’t know they had

just to watch me walk by

and me, I’m supposed to be sensible

leave my animal outside to cry


But when all of nature conspires to make me her glorious whore

it’s cuz in my body I hold the secret recipe of precisely what life is for


and the patriarchy that looks to shame me for it

is the same one making war

and I’ve said too much already, but I’ll tell you something more


to split yourself in two

is just the most radical thing you can do

so girl, if that shit ain’t up to you

then you simply are not free


cuz from the sunlight on my hair

to which eggs I grow to term

to the expression that I wear

all I really own is me


Yes, to split yourself in two

is just the most radical thing you can do

Goddess forbid that little adam should grow so jealous of eve


and in the face of the great farce of the nuclear age

feminism ain’t about equality, it’s about reprieve

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