Hosted by Randy Smit and Rhonda Edgington
Laurie Baron and I have written together with women at the Allegan County Jail and Holland’s Harbor House, and I’m so thankful she brings those experiences into her contribution to this month’s Poetry Corner, perfect for this Season of Reconciliation. Laurie says, “Each of these poems represents an ‘aha’ moment. Mine came as a response to the startling words I kept hearing said to and about incarcerated women. Rita Dove’s poem is an old favorite that resonates very differently as I ‘wake up’ to what whiteness means.”
~Rhonda
Dawn Revisited
By Rita Dove
Imagine you wake up
with a second chance: The blue jay
hawks his pretty wares
and the oak still stands, spreading
glorious shade. If you don’t look back,
the future never happens.
How good to rise in sunlight,
in the prodigal smell of biscuits –
eggs and sausage on the grill.
The whole sky is yours
to write on, blown open
to a blank page. Come on,
shake a leg! You’ll never know
who’s down there, frying those eggs,
if you don’t get up and see.
To the Women of the Allegan County Correctional Facility Writing Circle
By Laurie Baron
…belief is the only wind with breath enough
to take you past the deadly calms, the stopped motion
toward that place you have imagined,
the existence of which you cannot prove
except by going there.
Pat Schneider, “Your Boat, Your Words”
They tell me you are difficult—not compliant and respectful like the men
who file to the classroom, sit in their seats, shake the hand of the volunteer,
thank her for coming, week after week.
They are surprised that you are moody; your disruptions annoy them, your faces
masked with blank challenge. But why should you be easy?
Why should you trust anyone, let alone me, let alone each other, let alone yourselves?
They suspect “gals” is not the right thing to say anymore; now they call you “ladies”—why
does saying “women” embarrass them?
Some of you, in truth, are still mostly girls; some are grandmothers. Psychologists say
you are all arrested (no pun intended!) at the age you were when you began using
whatever you were using
to blur the pain of being beaten, raped, dismissed, discarded. You sit wary
in your red scrubs and orange plastic clogs with the glare of fluorescents and the blare of invisible
commands and I’m asking you to put words on paper.
To move a pen across a page can be hard.
You are too tired for a cloak of cleverness, and so what you set down
is true, and that is hard too.
Why, when you’re tired or sick, your abdomen cramping or your breasts sore with milk engorging for the
baby who is somewhere far from your arms,
why should you make the effort? Yet you do.
You follow a line of words. It’s not much, set against all that drains your spirits.
But it is something. It can lead you somewhere–
to yourselves, is what I think, and to what you can imagine. The place you cannot prove exists
except by going there.