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Anger is an incendiary power. I want to reclaim legitimate expressions of anger and not cede that power to the depraved and corrupt, not give it up to people who mistake chronic grievance and cruelty for a cleansing rage.

Presently it seems fine to be angry any time, any place, in any which way one wants, certainly on social media, but it’s increasingly OK in the real world too. People at the highest levels of government demonstrate this is so.

We’re normalizing the most vile kinds of name-calling, normalizing and celebrating physical brutality against unarmed civilians, and yet, it is still basically taboo for any woman of any race, creed, status or ethnicity to be visibly, audibly, demonstrably angry.

And yet, we are.

When I say I am not angry anymore ~Valerie Spain

I mean I absolutely am angry. I mean I will smash that face now bewildered by age, crush the skull and thrill at white hairs clinging to bone, swimming in blood. I mean it has been a long day of being happy and I have busted my ass to show up here— happy. When I say I am not angry anymore I mean I will have to tell you it took twenty years to get into therapy. Like how I had to stop doing everything myself—like every maid, matron and crone in my family who claimed she did it herself. And when I say I am not angry anymore I mean I love ruin and despair more than I should, and sometimes I am scarlet-tongued Kali slurping gore and sometimes the Virgin Mary staying the goddess’ hand while bleeding through blanket and sheets to the mattress. When I say I am not angry anymore I mean I am a hair-on-fire clown wielding a bloody axe in a schoolyard of screaming children. When I say I’m not angry anymore I mean I still swallow razor blades and hope someone notices. I mean I am not the tabby licking itself at the foot of your bed I am the steel muscled, open mouthed tigress ready to clamp her jaws on your neck and break it without regret. When I say I am not angry any more I mean I am the one who ate and ate and was never satisfied. I mean I am also a house cat and house cats look like tigers look like any big cat so beware. Do you think you are the only one who’s ever been abused? When I say I am not angry any more I mean I am a shorn novice kneeling naked on sharp stones, knotted lead-tipped discipline in hand still unsure unsure unsure of salvation.

Creative expression, whether poetry, music, painting, or dance—any or all of the arts—has the ability to transmute strong emotion in the crucible of the heart.

One of my very favorite poetic expressions of anger is from George Bernard Shaw’s great play, Saint Joan.

Joan was subject to six public examinations. She answered her inquisitors with incredible self-possession for a seventeen year old peasant girl, but their relentless questioning wore her down. They said the only way to avoid burning at the stake was to denounce her voices and confess. So at a point of great weariness, she signed a confession thinking she would be set free, but the reward for compliance was not freedom, but rather, a sentence to spend the rest of her life in a foul, dank English dungeon “eating the bread of sorrow and drinking the water of affliction.”

When she hears this, Joan grabs the confession, tears it up and says:

Yes, they told me you were fools, and that I was not to listen to your fine words nor trust to your charity. You promised me my life; but you lied. You think that life is nothing but not being stone dead. ... I could drag about in a skirt; I could let the banners and the trumpets and the knights and soldiers pass me and leave me behind as they leave the other women, if only I could hear the wind in the trees, the larks in the sunshine, the young lambs crying through the healthy frost, and the blessed, blessed church bells that send my angel voices floating to me on the wind. But without these things I cannot live; and by your wanting to take them away from me, or from any human creature, I know that your counsel is of the devil, and that mine is of God. ~excerpt from Saint Joan, a play by George Bernard Shaw

We can only ever be who we are. The rest is misery.

Joan has the last say. Not words from a play, but her actual words taken from the transcript of her trial.

"Whatever I have said about my deeds and words in this trial, I let it stand and wish to reaffirm it. Even if I should see the fire lit, and the hangman ready to begin the burning, and even if I were in the pyre, I could not say anything different." ~Joan of Arc, 1431

NOTE: My poem, “When I say I am not angry anymore”, came from a writing prompt in Kathryn Petruccelli’s recent 8-week poetry workshop titled Naming Names. The prompt was based on Luisa Muradyan’s poem, “When I Say I Am Not the Speaker of My Poems.” I picked up on bits of simmering anger and ran off and wrote a poem about rage.

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