Page 85 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2

who are revolutionaries in black skirts, who have red lips and carry red roses and will not kill. The women who

will not kill, so killing is forbidden. That is how strong they are.

The women say, “This is what we taught you in dreams you have forgotten you dreamed in your childhood, the

dreams that formed you and surface now at this time in your life when you are asking what is to be done, what is

to be done, what is to be done?”

Thisisthephotoofthemanwho,attheendofwhatheistodo,isnottokill. Thephotoisnotofthemanwhois

to be killed. The photo is of a man, who ultimately, because he is the revolutionary—the one who brings justice

like the sunlight or the rain— will not kill. The woman says so and so it is so. That is what the dream says. And it

says that all of this, the story, the strength not to kill, the strength that ends killing is in language, in the rhythm

of the words, and this is what we have forgotten. Earth, rhythm, language, light—they were to have come

together in a poetry from which the future might have arisen if we had listened and learned to speak that

language, its rhythms and images, its absolute poetry.

But then we forgot or yielded to the trance, to the relentless noise from which our cities dull as old metal and

gray egg cartons arise in the fluorescent lights of super markets and endless parking lots and deluded malls

which have no music to them and so are not the languages that we had been given to heal the world.

And because of this, because it may not be too late, the dream comes and the woman says, adamantly,

“The man, my lover, the woman, my daughter, her lover, we will not kill. At the end of the dream, at

the end of the dreams, we will not kill.”

The dream comes in another language, a language that emerged from a Literature, or a Literature that

emerged from a Language that, despite war, blood, prisons, cruelty, iron bars, sequestered women,

had a poetry beneath it that was a river of life, even when life was forbidden.

•••

The rain is here again like the tap of the heels of a woman who is dancing flamenco. She is dancing her

life and her death to the music of the guitar whose chord slides down from heaven to earth, from her

wild black hair into her pulsing groin, the bud of her clitoris within her red rose. Arpeggio. Crescendo.

This is why she will not kill. She will prohibit killing. She is like the rain. She returns. She persists. And so

the earth will be restored by the insistent and persistent rhythm of her dancing heels, one phrase after

another, in her secret Language of Restoration.

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