Blood-Light
by Natalie Diaz
My brother has a knife in his hand.
He has decided to stab my father.
This could be a story from the Bible,
if it wasn’t already a story about stars.
I weep alacranes—the scorpions clatter
to the floor like yellow metallic scissors.
They land upside down on their backs and eyes,
but writhe and flip to their segmented bellies.
My brother has forgotten to wear shoes again.
My scorpions circle him, whip at his heels.
In them is what stings in me –
it brings my brother to the ground.
He rises, still holding the knife.
My father ran out of the house,
down the street, crying like a lamplighter –
but nobody turned their lights on. It is dark.
The only light left is in the scorpions –
there is a small light left in the knife too.
My brother now wants to give me the knife.
Some might say, My brother wants to stab me.
He tries to pass it to me – like it is a good thing.
Like, Don’t you want a little light in your belly?
Like the way Orion and Scorpius –
across all that black night – pass the sun.
My brother loosens his mouth –
between his teeth, throbbing red Antares.
One way to open a body to the stars, with a knife.
One way to love a sister, help her bleed light.
From Postcolonial Love Poem. Reproduced with kind permission from Faber & Faber.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best Collection 2020
Postcolonial Love Poem
Natalie Diaz
About Natalie Diaz
Natalie Diaz (b. 1978, Needles CA) is the holder of a MacArthur ‘Genius’ award, a former professional basketball player and one of the few remaining speakers of the Mojave language. ‘Where we come from, we say language has an energy, and I feel that it is a very physical energy’. Diaz’s US publishers, Graywolf, describe Postcolonial Love Poem as ‘an anthem of desire against erasure’, of which the erasure of language is just one form.
‘Ash can make you clean, / as alkaline as it is a grief’, writes Diaz in ‘That Which Cannot be Stilled’. Her new collection performs that work of cleansing and mourning, shot through with desire and celebration. ‘In this book’, writes Diaz, ‘I demanded a different visibility, one that makes my nation uncomfortable – my speakers refused to be defined by their wounds and would instead sow them and reap light from them.’
Hear Natalie Between the Ears: Song of Mojave Desert on BBC Radio 3
