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Voltairine de Cleyre

“If this is the price to be paid for an idea, then let us pay. There is no need of being troubled about it, afraid, or ashamed. This is the time to boldly say, “Yes, I believe in the displacement of this system of injustice by a just one; I believe in the end of starvation, exposure, and the crimes caused by them; I believe in the human soul regnant over all laws which man has made or will make; I believe there is no peace now, and there will never be peace, so long as one rules over another; I believe in the total disintegration and dissolution of the principle and practice of authority; I am an Anarchist, and if for this you condemn me, I stand ready to receive your condemnation.”

Voltairine de Cleyre

And I’ll dance with you in Vienna
I’ll be wearing a river’s disguise
The hyacinth wild on my shoulder,
My mouth on the dew of your thighs
And I’ll bury my soul in a scrapbook,
With the photographs there, and the moss
And I’ll yield to the flood of your beauty
My cheap violin and my cross
And you’ll carry me down on your dancing
To the pools that you lift on your wrist
Oh my love, Oh my love
Take this waltz, take this waltz
It’s yours now. It’s all that there is
from Leonard Cohen’s translation of Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Little Viennese Waltz” (via mpiedlourde)

And don’t you dare for one moment paint these words as anything other than they are; which is me standing up for myself. Me defending myself from your baseless judgements. Me endeavouring to address the silence that enables men like you to minimize and place aside the realities of women’s experience. If I assault you with my words today, it is because you deserve it, as your judgements softened in seemingly benign civil language, are an assault on my life, and I won’t suffer that in silence. I won’t.

I have never wanted anything more than the wild creatures have, a broad waft of clean air, a day to lie on the grass at times, with nothing to do but to slip the blades through my fingers, and look as long as I pleased at the whole blue arch, and the screens of green and white between; leave for a month to float and float along the salt crests and among the foam, or roll with my naked skin over a clean long stretch of sunshiny sand; food that I liked, straight from the cool ground, and time to taste its sweetness, and time to rest after tasting; sleep when it came, and stillness, that the sleep might leave me when it would, not sooner … This is what I wanted,—this, and free contact with my fellows … not to love and lie, and be ashamed, but to love and say I love, and be glad of it; to feel the currents of ten thousand years of passion flooding me, body to body, as the wild things meet. I have asked no more.

VOLTAIRINE DE CLEYRE

from Voltairine De Cleyre
by Emma Goldman
[Published privately by The Oriole Press, Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, mcmxxxii]

Edition limited to two-hundred copies of which fifty are printed
on Nuremberg deckle-edge paper for private distribution
with the compliments of the publisher

(via jacobbuckrop)

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