Shake Loose My Skin

by Sonia Sanchez

  men and women coming for their inheritance.

  And you challenged us to catch up with our

  own breaths to breathe in Latinos Asians Native Americans

  Whites Blacks Gays Lesbians Muslims and Jews, to gather

  up our rainbow-colored skins in peace and racial justice

  as we try to answer your long-ago question: Is there

  a nonviolent peacemaking army that can shut down

  the Pentagon?

  And you challenged us to breathe in Bernard Haring’s words:

  the materialistic growth—mania for

  more and more production and more

  and more markets for selling unnecessary

  and even damaging products is a

  sin against the generation to come

  what shall we leave to them:

  rubbish, atomic weapons numerous

  enough to make the earth

  uninhabitable, a poisoned

  atmosphere, polluted water?

  5.

  “Love in practice is a harsh and dreadful

  thing compared to love in dreams,” said a Russian writer.

  Now I know at great cost Martin that as we burn

  something moves out of the flames

  (call it spirit or apparition)

  till no fire or body or ash remain

  we breathe out and smell the world again

  Aye-Aye-Aye Ayo-Ayo-Ayo Ayeee-Ayeee-Ayeee

  Amen men men men Awoman woman woman woman

  Men men men Woman woman woman

  Men men Woman woman

  Men Woman

  Womanmen.

  For Sweet Honey in the Rock

  I’m gonna stay on the battlefield

  I’m gonna stay on the battlefield

  I’m gonna stay on the battlefield til I die.

  I’m gonna stay on the battlefield

  I’m gonna stay on the battlefield

  I’m gonna stay on the battlefield til I die.

  i had come into the city carrying life in my eyes

  amid rumors of death,

  calling out to everyone who would listen

  it is time to move us all into another century

  time for freedom and racial and sexual justice

  time for women and children and men time for hands unbound

  i had come into the city wearing peaceful breasts

  and the spaces between us smiled

  i had come into the city carrying life in my eyes.

  i had come into the city carrying life in my eyes.

  And they followed us in their cars with their computers

  and their tongues crawled with caterpillars

  and they bumped us off the road turned over our cars,

  and they bombed our buildings killed our babies,

  and they shot our doctors maintaining our bodies,

  and their courts changed into confessionals

  but we kept on organizing we kept on teaching believing

  loving doing what was holy moving to a higher ground

  even though our hands were full of slaughtered teeth

  but we held out our eyes delirious with grace.

  but we held out our eyes delirious with grace.

  I’m gonna treat everybody right

  I’m gonna treat everybody right

  I’m gonna treat everybody right til I die.

  I’m gonna treat everybody right

  I’m gonna treat everybody right

  I’m gonna treat everybody right til I die.

  come. i say come, you sitting still in domestic bacteria

  come. i say come, you standing still in double-breasted mornings

  come. i say come, and return to the fight.

  this fight for the earth

  this fight for our children

  this fight for our life

  we need your hurricane voices

  we need your sacred hands

  i say, come, sister, brother to the battlefield

  come into the rain forests

  come into the hood

  come into the barrio

  come into the schools

  come into the abortion clinics

  come into the prisons

  come and caress our spines

  i say come, wrap your feet around justice

  i say come, wrap your tongues around truth

  i say come, wrap your hands with deeds and prayer

  you brown ones

  you yellow ones

  you black ones

  you gay ones

  you white ones

  you lesbian ones

  Comecomecomecomecome to this battlefield

  called life, called life, called life. . . .

  I’m gonna stay on the battlefield

  I’m gonna stay on the battlefield

  I’m gonna stay on the battlefield til I die.

  I’m gonna stay on the battlefield

  I’m gonna stay on the battlefield

  I’m gonna stay on the battlefield til I die.

  Aaaayeee Babo (Praise God)

  1.

  There are women sailing the sky

  I walk between them

  They who wear silk, muslin and burlap skins touching mine

  They who dance between urine and violets

  They who are soiled disinherited angels with masculine eyes.

  This earth is hard symmetry

  This earth of feverish war

  This earth inflamed with hate

  This patch of tongues corroding the earth’s air.

  Who will journey to the place we require of humans?

  I grow thin on these algebraic equations reduced to a final

  common denominator.

  2.

  I turn away from funerals from morning lightning

  I feast on rain and laughter

  What is this sound I hear moving through our bones

  I breathe out leaving our scent in the air.

  3.

  I came to this life with serious hands

  I came observing the terrorist eyes moving in and out of

  Southern corners

  I wanted to be the color of bells

  I wanted to surround trees and spill autumn from my fingers

  I came to this life with serious feet—heard other footsteps

  gathering around me

  Women whose bodies exploded with flowers.

  4.

  Life.

  Life is

  from curled embryo

  to greed

  to flesh

  transistors

  webpages obscuring butterflies.

  Our life

  is a feast of flutes

  orbiting chapels

  no beggar women here

  no treasonous spirit here

  just a praise touch

  created from our spirit tongues

  We bring the noise of mountain language

  We bring the noise of Sunday mansions

  We enter together paddling a river of risks

  in order to reshape This wind, This sea,

  This sky, This dungeon of syllables

  We have become nightingales singing us out of fear

  Splashing the failed places with light.

  We are here.

  On the green of leaves

  On the shifting waves of blues,

  Knowing once that our places divided us

  Knowing once that our color divided us

  Knowing once that our class divided us

  Knowing once that our sex divided us

  Knowing once that our country divided us

  Now we carry the signature of women in our veins

  Now we build our reconciliation canes in morning fields

  Now the days no longer betray us

  and we ascend into wave after wave of our blood milk.

  What can we say without blood?

  5.

  Her Story.

  Herstory smiles at us.<
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  Little by little we shall interpret the decorum of peace

  Little by little we shall make circles of these triangular stars

  We Shall strip-mine the world’s eyes of secrets

  We shall gather up our voices

  Braid them into our flesh like emeralds

  Come. Bring us all the women’s hands

  Let us knead calluses into smiles

  Let us gather the mountains in our children’s eyes

  Distill our unawakened love

  Say hello to the mangoes

  the uninformed men

  the nuns

  the prostitutes

  the rainmothers

  the squirrels

  the clouds

  the homeless.

  Come. Celebrate our footsteps insatiable as sudden breathing

  Love curves the journey of these women sails

  Love says Awoman. Awoman to these tongues of thunder

  Come celebrate this prayer

  I bring to our common ground.

  It is enough

  to confound the conquistadores

  it is enough to shape our lace,

  our name.

  Make us become healers

  Come celebrate the poor

  the women

  the gays

  the lesbians

  the men

  the children

  the black, brown, yellow, white

  Sweat peeling with stories

  Aaaaayeee babo.

  I spit on the ground

  I spit language on the dust

  I spit memory on the water

  I spit hope on this seminary

  I spit teeth on the wonder of women, holy volcanic women

  Recapturing the memory of our most sacred sounds.

  Come

  where the drum speaks

  come tongued by fire and water and bone

  come praise God and

  Ogun and Shango and

  Olukun and Oya and

  Jesus

  Come praise our innocence

  our decision to be human

  reenter the spirit of morning doves

  and our God is near

  I say our God is near

  I say our God is near

  Aaaayeee babo Aaaayeee babo Aaaayeee babo

  (Praise God).

  CREDITS

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for the permission to reprint the following:

  Material from I’ve Been a Woman by Sonia Sanchez copyright © 1978 by Sonia Sanchez. Reprinted by permission of Third World Press, Inc., Chicago, Illinois.

  Material from homegirls & handgrenades by Sonia Sanchez copyright © 1984 by Sonia Sanchez. Appears by permission of the publisher, Thunder’s Mouth Press.

  Permission granted by the publisher Africa World Press, Inc. for reprinting the following poems from Sonia Sanchez’s Under a Soprano Sky copyright © 1987 by Sonia Sanchez, all rights reserved: “Under a Soprano Sky”; “Philadelphia: Spring, 1985”; “Haiku (for the police on Osage Ave.)”; “Dear Mama”; “Fall”; “Fragment I”; “Fragment 2”; “Haiku”; “Towhomitmayconcern”; “Blues”; “Song No. 2”; “An Anthem”; and “Graduation Notes.”

  “Aaaayeee Babo (Praise God)” was commissioned by the Auburn Theological Seminary for Speaking in the Open: The Public Vocation of Women’s Theologies.

  B E A C O N P R E S S

  25 Beacon Street

  Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892

  www.beacon.org

  B E A C O N P R E S S B O O K S

  are published under the auspices of

  the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

  © 1999 by Sonia Sanchez

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  15 14 13 12 11 18 17 16 15 14

  This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the uncoated paper

  ANSI/NISO specifications for permanence as revised in 1992.

  Text design by Anne Chalmers

  Composition by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sanchez, Sonia, 1935—

  Shake loose my skin : new and selected poems / Sonia Sanchez.

  p. cm.

  e-ISBN: 978-0-8070-6889-2

  ISBN 978-0-8070-6853-3 (pbk.)

  1. Afro-American women—Poetry.

  2. Afro-Americans—Poetry.

  I. Title.

  PS3569.A468S53 1999

  811’.54—dc21

  98-41371