The Cage She Carried Open (Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You cut your hair
when you were seven
and told your mother
you would not
grow it back
until you had learned
Latin
because a head
that did not know Latin
did not deserve
to be decorated
and you learned Latin
in twenty lessons
and did not
grow the hair back
anyway.

[Verse 2]
You entered
the convent
at sixteen
not because
you loved God
more than the world
but because
the convent
had a library
and a room
with a lock on it
and the world
in sixteen sixty-seven
did not offer
a woman
a library
and a room
with a lock on it
without
a husband in it
and the husband
would have wanted
to talk to you
in the evenings
and the evenings
were when
the Wernicke's area
of a woman
who thinks in verse
needs the room
to be quiet.

[Chorus]
You wrote
the greatest poem
in the Spanish language
about the right
of a woman
to think
and you called it
a dream
because a dream
was the only container
the seventeenth century
would let
a nun
put an argument in
without burning
the nun
or the argument.

[Verse 3]
The bishop
told you
to stop writing.
You wrote him
a letter
that is still
the most elegant
act of disobedience
in the history
of the Spanish language
and then
you stopped writing
and gave away
your library
and your instruments
and died
of plague
two years later
nursing the sisters
who were dying
around you.

[Outro]
The letter
outlived
the bishop.
The poem
outlived
the letter.
The library
you gave away
is in pieces
across
four continents now
and every book
in it
remembers
the room
with the lock
and the girl
who cut her hair
at seven
because Latin
was more important
than being
decorated.

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