TENDER

At sixteen, I stopped feeling ashamed of desiring women but dealing with a public queer identity—navigating a world that told me if I wasn’t invisible I wasn’t wanted—stressed me.

 Then and now, I loved media written by or about women—safe havens for the femme self I was shamed into hiding. I felt kinship with women whose inner lives were ignored or denigrated. H. D.’s book Sea Garden was one such work. 

Because my queerness was private and hypothetical (I hadn’t so much as kissed a girl at the time) my sexuality was profoundly interior. Sea Garden reminded me of Cape Town, the patch of beach where I listened to Mariah Carey and imagined a life without worry. Unafraid of traditionally feminine images—flowers, the sea—H. D. inspired me with her luscious and acrid, florid and bitter, god-haunted landscapes—erotic, psychological, and spiritual. 

In H. D.’s poem “Orchard,” the prostrate speaker entreats a god’s absent son to spare him from loveliness. Isn’t this an endlessly queer dilemma—to love and loathe one’s desire?

 I knew those rituals from my own fantasies beckoning some big, god of a woman to have her way with my body, yet stay, stay tender, leave me—so that I may call her again—loved, sore, alive.

 by Keletso Modiba