The Price of Ignorance

By Laura Ivers

She has shut me out,

this black mother of mine;

closed all her windows,

locked all her doors.

Yesterday’s sun-bathed child

has changed into sheets of

winter white.

I knock incessantly at her door.

She is indifferent.

Cold, crystallized flakes of

yesterday’s tears

drift outside her widow’s pain

This black mother of mine

has locked me out,

closed up all her doors.

I am death to her,

the winter of all her dreams.

*   *   *   *   *

I  used my poetry to handle memories that were surfacing from my childhood.  At this time I started reading the poetry of Langston Hughes . . . and then everything just sort of fell into place. The abuse which took place in my family seemed to mirror our racist society at large and so I began to play with these themes within my writing.  I wanted to unveil the hidden structures that runs throughout the three sisters of oppression:  Racism,  Sexism, and Classism.

I sought to unveil not out of a sense of revenge, but rather as a call to action . . . to heal over this dreadful past.  While I was doing my healing work, racism got hooked up in my mind as the perpetrator.  It felt like it was literally raping my soul.  And then there was the coming to terms with my own Whiteness . . . for what my culture had done.  Writing these poems was the only way that I knew how to ask for forgiveness; and it was the only way that I knew how to effectively express my sense of outrage.

Poetry became my balm of salvation, my experience of Amazing Grace.