Spoken Word: Amanda Oak
>> Friday, March 11, 2011
This beautiful spoken word video from Amanda at "Kind Over Matter"
Simply gorgeous~
Simply gorgeous~
From Amandas blog: A little back story on the poem : I wrote it back in 2006. When the casualties of the Iraqi War were spiking. When Bush was obviously still in power. When I was in a long distance relationship. He was living in Philadelphia & I was living across the state, where we reside now, near Pittsburgh. We would meet every other weekend almost halfway, at a hotel & spend the weekend together. I wrote this in a rush, after one of those weekends. It came from the deepest parts of my heart. Thank you so much for listening/reading & being so open to me sharing these bits of myself with you.sunday worship, bending like photographs
the women in my family were taught
to bury their tears in the bathroom,
usually under the shower spigot
that behaves like a broom sweeping
the pieces of our splintered hearts
down the drain because
from a distance & without sound
the involuntary contraction of the
voice box, the bending & bowing
of the upper-body can easily be
mistaken for laughter
the mouthful of air that gets wedged
in your windpipe & your lachrymal
glands like clouds creating a slick track
for your mind-set to slide downward
are secrets to soft to share when the sun
is nowhere in sight to soak up the trickle
before it runs rapid sailing toward the edge
of your waterfall chin
yesterday morning, in bed, my lover & i,
our awareness of concern was almost
as absent as our irish & indian bloodlines,
thin like the light coming through the tiny
imperfections in the drapes standing
as bodyguards, protecting us from the
outside world, our relations, acquaintances,
the war pounding so hard on the heavy hotel
door is easily ignored but never all together
forgotten, while we rested our love on cheap
cotton sheets, some are forced to lie in blood
we are caught in a tearless generation, our
wet looseness was rubbed out with the industrial
revolution, the screeching of gears replaced
the outward cry of communal emotion & we
have yet to make our way back, we run around
our pain like it's a christmas tree, sit around it,
decorate it, photograph it, but never climb
up in it, sometimes the weight of decision
stretches its self so far out across my shoulders
that i can barely even move, i just march
back & forth like the misguided minds
that run this godforsaken nation
our sunday morning was not spent stiff
in a church under the scrutiny of the
religious right with their flashbulb eyes
flickering against every one of their sins
because we
were in bed,
bodies bending like photographs,
learning what revolutions
are supposed to be
fought for
& that pleasure
is just as infectious
as tears or laughter
but it takes a whole lot of strength
to carry any one of them out
alone Read more...
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