Five of Staves - um poema de Diane Wakoski

Vou postar este poema de Diane Wakoski em versão original em língua inglesa. Por questões de linguagem e referências culturais, é muito difícil de traduzir (talvez a gente ainda tente). Mas gosto dele -muito forte!- como poema, e também me chamou muito a atenção por tratar - com tanta sagacidade e ironia - do tema da "homosociabilidade", que é até uma questão muito relevante para as pesquisas que minha orientanda Fernanda Moraes e eu andamos fazendo na sociologia (quem tiver curiosidade ao respeito, um texto nosso está no:http://www.uff.br/esportesociedade/pdf/es903.pdf )

5 of Staves (Wands):Young Men Fighting or Playing with Green Poles.

The secret
has always been
what men find
to do
with eachother. Those great
majority of moments which, like football
and jock itch, and mining
exclude women.

We have so
little.
The hut
where we go
when we’re bleeding, and the moon
is swimming or being washed from out between our
thighs.
Water polo,
a big sport,
at my Southern California high school,
favored by rich kids who lived in the
Heights with swimming pools
boys
who drove their new Fords when they were juniors
after their sixteenth birthday, boys
who closed their eyes when they touched
us in those wet places, all
of us hoping their hands
would not come away bloody. But the
lips always were.
whether we say “Bah-bah-bah-
Bah-bah-bra-Ann” or
my “Little Deuce Coupe”
whether we drank cherry cokes
or milk or wrote poetry or watched movies, we walked in our starched crinolines
and lacy blouses once a month to
segregated rooms, smelling like fish
under our deodorant.

But the boys, they had fun
when they were segregated;
when they were alone together
they touched
-- with jokes,
or greetings
“Hey Man”
as we never did;
they talked,
as we still cannot;
they found out how to run the world,
as,
of course,
we do not.

And water polo, those boys
hitting that big white ball around
in the green-like-emerald water
of the FUHS Olympic-sized pool,
Oh, they even knew our secrets.
That the moon they tapped and spun and slapped
around the water was just like the one
pushed out between our thighs each month
- if we were good,
- if we were lucky,
- if we were smart.

Oh, don´t tell me EVER
that women have secret lives
or treasures
that no one except other women
knows about.
Tell me,
instead,
that the secret is,
and always has been,
why
men find so much pleasure in each
other’s company; why women
when they are segregated and together with
each other, have only the menstrual hut,
the old, rusty, monthly blood
to share?
or its taboo opposite:
the little clone of ourselves
forming inside our bodies,
etching its face and shape on the moon,
which will then disappear for nine even lonelier
months.

A child to replace the mother.