Self-Portrait with Weeping Woman
I know why I fell hard for Hecuba—
shins skinned and lips split to blooming lupine
on her throat’s rough coat, hurled down the whole length
of disaster—I’m sure I’d grown to know
by then to slacken as a sail against
the current and squall of a woman’s woe.
What could I do but chorus my ruddered
howl to hers? When you’re a brown girl raised up
near the river, there’s always a woman
bereft and bank-wrecked, bloodied and bleating
her insistent lament. Ay Llorona—
every crossing is a tomb and a tune,
a wolf-wail and the moon that turns me to
scratch at the tracks of every mud-dirged girl.
Copyright © 2019 by Deborah Paredez. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 4, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
“There is so much horror these days, but there's a long history of terror thrust into the lives of brown folks and a long history of women standing on the shore raging against it. The sonnet is the envelope into which I've been folding my scrawled letters lately, and in this one I wanted to honor those women—mythic and real—whose refusal to relinquish their grief and rage catalyzed epic transformations for them and offered me a way of knowing and moving through the world.”
—Deborah Paredez
Deborah Paredez
Deborah Paredez is the author of Year of the Dog (BOA, 2020), a finalist for the CLMP Firecracker Award, and This Side of Skin (Wings Press, 2002).