The City’s Past and Future Lovers

South Bend on Purpose is a podcast about place, belonging, and South Bend hosted by Jacob Titus, Dustin Mix, and John Garry.

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This week on South Bend on Purpose, we are reading selections from Audre Lorde’s poem “New York City 1970” and reflecting on what it might be saying about our life together in South Bend.

NEW YORK CITY 1970

How do you spell change like frayed slogan underwear
with the emptied can of yesterday’s meaning
with yesterdays’ names?
And what does the we-bird see with
who has lost its I’s?
There is nothing beautiful left in the streets of this city.
I have come to believe in death and renewal by fire.
Past questioning the necessities of blood
or why it must be mine or my children’s time
that will see the grim city quake to be reborn perhaps
blackened again but this time with a sense of purpose;
tired of the past tense forever, of assertion and repetition
of the ego-trips through an incomplete self
where two years ago proud rang for promise but now
it is time for fruit and all the agonies are barren—
only the children are growing:
For how else can the self become whole
save by making self into its own new religion?
I am bound like an old lover—a true believer—
to this city’s death by accretion and slow ritual,
and I submit to its penance for trial
as new steel is tried
I submit my children to its death throes and agony
and they are not even the city’s past lovers. But I submit them
to the harshness and growing cold to the brutalizations
which is survived
will teach them strength or an understanding of how strength is gotten
and will not be forgotten: It will be their city then:
I submit them
loving them above all others save myself
to the fire to the rage to the ritual scarifications
to be tried as new steel is tried;
and in its wasting the city shall try them
as the blood-splash of a royal victim
tries the hand of the destroyer.

            II
I hide behind tenements and subways in florescent alleys
watching as flames walk the streets of an empire’s altar
raging through veins of the sacrificial stenchpot
smeared upon the east shore of a continent’s insanity
conceived in the psychic twilight of murders and pilgrims
rank with money and nightmare and too many useless people
who will not move over nor die, who cannot bend
even before the winds of their own preservation
even under the weight of their own hates
Who cannot amend nor conceive nor even learn to share
their own visions
who bomb my children into mortar in churches
and work plastic offal and metal and the flesh of their enemies
into subway rush-hour temples where obscene priests
fingers and worship each other in secret
and think they are praying when squat
to shit money-pebbles shaped like their parents’ brains—
who exist to go into dust to exist again
grosser and more swollen and without ever relinquishing
space or breath or energy from their private hoard.
I do not need to make war nor peace
with these prancing and murderous deacons
who refuse to recognize their role in this convenant we live upon
and so have come to fear and despise even their own children;
but I condemn myself, and my loves
past and present
and the blessed enthusiasms of all my children
to this city
without reason or future
without hope
to be tried as the new steel is tried
before trusted to slaughter.
I will walk down the withering limbs of my last discarded house
and there is nothing worth salvage left in this city
but the faint reedy voices like echoes
of once beautiful children.

-Audre Lorde (1991)