If you find your true voice, bring it to the land of the dead. There is kindness in the ashes. And terror in non-identity. A little girl lost in a ruined house, this fortress of my poems. I write with the blind malice of children pelting a madwoman, like a crow, with stones. No—I don’t write: I open a breach in the dusk so the dead can send messages through. What is this job of writing? To steer by mirror-light in darkness. To imagine a place known only to me. To sing of distances, to hear the living notes of painted birds on Christmas trees. My nakedness bathed you in light. You pressed against my body to drive away the great black frost of night. My words demand the silence of a wasteland. Some of them have hands that grip my heart the moment they’re written. Some words are doomed like lilacs in a storm. And some are like the precious dead—even if I still prefer to all of them the words for the doll of a sad little girl.
This poem is one of many uncollected poems (written between 1969 and 1971) from a 17-page manuscript Pizarnik gave to the poet Perla Rotzait less than a year before her suicide. It was translated by Cole Heinowitz, who is a poet, translator, and scholar based in New York. Her books of poetry include The Rubicon (The Rest), Stunning in Muscle Hospital (Detour), and Daily Chimera (Incommunicado).
The act of writing can be a very mysterious one if we can put aside our egos and listen for the insights
the spirits are sending through us. I like this line very much: 'No - I don't write, I open a breach in the dusk so the dead can send messages through.' Any good poet, with a sense of the transcendent, will relate to that.
Poetry for the ages that lasts longer than the poet who succumbed to life’s tossing stones.
Powerful poem.