Bone—Black Inner Cave

I bring my book to her and read aloud. Like Rilke, she tells me not to be afraid to look deeply into everything, not even pain. I can tell her—my friend, who loves me always—that I want to belong, that it hurts to live always on the outside. She tells me there are many ways to belong in this world, and that it is my work to discover where I belong.

At night, when everyone is silent and everything is still, I lie in the darkness of my windowless room, the place where they exile me from the community of their heart, and search the unmoving blackness to see if I can find my way home. I tell myself stories, write poems, record my dreams. In my journal I write: I belong in this place of words. This is my home. This dark, bone-black inner cave where I am making a world for myself.

Bell hooks, bone black.

Peace is a Semicolon

The sun spills white as judgment
across the stone.

There, a man lies
stretched on the pavement,
another body given over
to the boulevard.

The marble burns.
But the poor learn early
to take fire
as one more thing endured.

Men pass.
Their polished shoes
speak first,
and never kindly.

No one bends.
No one kneels to ask
whether breath still labors
in that hollow chest.

Nearby, in the charity of shade,
a dog keeps watch.

He knows the arithmetic of streets:
the cruelty of noon,
the patience of hunger,
the brief mercy of shadow.

O brother of dust and gutter,
quiet witness at the curb,
you and this fallen man
belong to the same republic—

that wide country of the forgotten
whose only law
is endurance.

Star Under Cloth

And sometimes—
when ritual hush fell like snow
and the air thickened with older names,
when gestures turned like keys
in locks I could not see—
I felt each soul as a star kept under cloth,
each life a fire sworn to its orbit;
and I knew the terrible tenderness of it:
not all stars are kind,
yet all must burn true.

So you made a temple of me, O light—
not of marble,
but of measured hours and reined desire,
of mercy laid as mortar,
of truth squared to the tongue,
of love obedient to will.
And because you built, you exposed—
for temples gather dust as surely as cottages.
The brighter the lamp, the clearer the dust.
So I sweep, and let the lamp judge.