Family Affairs Flashcards
you let down, from arched
- seperation
- reference to Rapunzel (princess, superior, fairy-tale life)
Windows,
-
Over hand-cut stones of your
- value and preciousness
Cathedrals, seas of golden hair.
- metaphor
- precious
While I, pulled by dusty braids,
- force
- difference
Left furrows in the
- way she was dragged
- efforts of resistance
Sands of African beaches.
- dispossessed and dislocated
Princes and commoners
- desirability
Climbed over waves to reach
- convoy
Your vaulted boudoirs.
- enshrined behind closed doors
As the sun, capriciously,
- Impulsively
- merciless
- personification
Struck sliver fire from waiting
- alliteration
- harshness and violence
Chains, where I was bound.
- vast difference of experiences
My screams never reached
- fear and helplessness
the rare tower where you
- amplifies the divide
Lay, birthing masters for
- perpetuation of oppression
My sons, and for my
-
Daughters, a swarm of
-
Unclean badgers, to consume
- seen as unclean
- persecuted
- imposed by the ‘masters’
Their history.
- power destroyed a history
- dispossessed
Tired now of pedestal existence
- tired of being placed on a pedestal
For fear of flying
- lofty height of the white woman
And vertigo, you descend
- lofty height of the woman
And step lightly over
- lack of concern for what has happened
My centuries of horror
- was tormentful and scarring
And take my hand,
- goes past the bad and straight to the good, no build up
Smiling, call me sister.
- distance
Sister, accept
- sarcastic and ironic tone
That I must wait a
- things do not happen instantly
While. Allow an age
- time required to heal the memories
Of dust to fill
- displacement
Ruts left on my
- left her own country
Beach in Africa
- was her beach
Overview
- enslavement
- divide of black and white families
- free verse
- enjambment reinforces the length of time
