“My Pen is a Machete”: Transforming English

it is most clear during

lovemaking

when the separation of everyday life lifts for a while/

when a kiss/ and a stroke/ and enter my lover

i am also a child re-entering my mother. . .

i want to return/ to a womb-state of harmony/ and also to the ancient world

i enter my lover

but it is she in her orgasm who returns

i see her face for a long moment/ the unconscious bliss that an infant carries/

the memory of behind its shut eyes.

then when it is she who makes love to me. . .

the intensity/ is also pushing out

a borning!

she comes in/ and is then identified

with the ecstasy that is born. . .

So i too return to the mystery of my mother/and of the world

as it must have been

when the motherbond was exalted.

Going through this exercise of rewriting prose as if it were a poem  required me to thing through the purpose of each word, and its significance within a sentence and its purpose. The use of pauses through punctuation is a process that took many attempts to figure out the impact of the word as a function of the authors message. In my decision to create a poem of emotion with the prose from Rich’s “Of Woman Born”, I chose to also create a structural relationship of the words. Each sentence that Rich creates in her prose is a completion of an idea or a continuation of words that relate to one another. In this week’s reading from Shange in ” My Pen is a Machete, she creates intentional responses of the reader to the words in her poems through the pauses in the form of “/” or breaks in stanzas. While reading the pauses made me focus in on particular words and how they related to her overall message in the poem. When re-writing my prose I created the purposeful meaning and emotion of words that otherwise was not captured in prose form, but became more vivid in the form of poetry.