Philosophies

By Dorothea Lasky b. 1978 Dorothea Lasky

The man who murders his wife

Is not the same as the man

Who goes around and murders a stranger.

I am a woman but I am not

The same as another woman.

Identity politics are bullshit.

There is only the smart and the evil,

The good and the righteous.

There is only one color on the earth.

In its infinite degradations it becomes music and mathematics.

There is shit on my hands

When I have been playing around with specifics.

Love your lover. You are a lover.

With each breath God has put a golden faith

Upon the snowy mountains of the world.

Here, look at the snowy mountains,

Glittering with snow.

They are wiser than you might think.

And in your soul, the small grey animals

Of the world sit and wait to do good

For you, and together

We are one thing, bleating a

Somber, scurrying lullaby to

Lapsing pinkish angels.

Upon a mountain

The angels smile sleepily as they stretch

Their very long legs, thinking of us.

And wise they might seem, us and the angels,

But really it is only God who is wise.

Dorothea Lasky, "Philosophies" from Awe. Copyright © 2007 by Dorthea Lasky. Reprinted by permission of Wave Books.

Source: Awe (Wave Books, 2007)

Biography

Dorothea Lasky was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. She earned a BA at Washington University and an MFA at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has published two collections of poetry, AWE (2007) and Black Life (2010), as well as several chapbooks, including the polemical Poetry Is Not a Project (2010). Her poems have appeared in a number of prominent publications, including the New Yorker, Paris Review, and . . .

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