Watch a staging of Cry choreographed by Alvin Ailey for Judith Jamison, dedicated to Black Women and mothers.
To get through the gates of heaven, you will have to pose in a gesture that expresses your life / dig down into what was meant to stay buried
and flourish
Write your story with the body’s hieroglyphic / Climb the stair of air and leap
Make the gesture of being touched by the holy spirit ; go to the nearest wall and kick through it
Reach down and join the earth and sky in marriage
Move as if furiously pulling weeds
Then harvest beans in the basket of your skirt
With legs up to your armpits, run to the gates of hell and back with your arms full of bread
Make the gesture of weeping above a black void
Make the gesture of an explosion / of shoveling a grave / of changing a diaper
Stalk like a hungry panther
Float like a skirted umbrella
Make the gesture of breaking a car window,
Make the gesture of an exhausted queen denying death
Make the gesture of a bird flying through a ribcage
Show God listening through sacred tears.
Make a sacred covenant refusing defeat, stir cornbread batter
Make the gesture of the rising son and display three colors
Show a wave becoming a tsunami
Make the gesture of ripples / of droplets /
Of sunlight
Make the gesture of flames eating a city
Praise shout the floor of the cathedral is on fire
Make the gesture of denying a slow death
Show panic / Show joy / Show wading to baptism
Make the gesture of a cut dahlia
its satellite spinning through misting rain
Break open like a dandelion
Now waterfall and honey hush
Thrash against gravity — lift your skirt & march
The Dirty Rat 