Women's Voices For Change

More Words for Snow Broken and unbroken, toothless, houndless. Unsplittable, unheard-of sexy thing which fireworks then disappears. Smoke-in-the-air. Word balloons to dent the atmosphere like ………………..Don’t go home yet—touch me— ……….I remember how you looked. Grief machine. Killer of taxicab drivers and kids in new buses, well for skinny strays, lost key heaven. All the things I want to say…

Learning how to read art by way of “deep-looking” can lead to a more creative way of seeing that could be applied to a number of other areas of human endeavor, and maybe, even to a way of life.

"When Fanny Lou Hamer said” champions the assertion of the most basic human and civil rights through means sanctioned by our Constitution: peaceful assembly and protest, voting, running for office, and the everyday radical acts of poetry, hope, and prayer.

It will help, the poem seems to suggest, if we focus on family and the world of nature rather than the world of the human. Some aspects of that world are just too unbearable right now for a sustained gaze.

Another source of solace has been poetry; reading, studying, and writing it has been the heartbeat of my days. With that in mind, this week’s column will present some poetry for you: a selection of winter poems by Emily Dickinson

Poetry Sunday’s first feature this month, “Paul Robeson” by Gwendolyn Brooks, celebrated a political voice that was both “adult” and “large,” and today’s poem about the collective voice of Black Americans speaks out powerfully in both registers.

I love the poem for its assertion that voting always matters and that “a collectivity of votes . . . can really / make some noise.”

Sometimes we rely on poetry as a sort of goad—to bear witness, expose evil or hypocrisy in others, or expose ourselves to ourselves.