‘Heard last night’ at the Women’s Center
Women Renewed collage project
I’ve held several circles at the Women’s Center of Jacksonville so far this summer for the Women Renewed program participants. These are formerly incarcerated women who are finding hope and new life through this program, which gives them coping skills and employment opportunities.
One thing I’ve learned from this work is, for women to stay out of jail, they need three things: a job, support, and their GED. The Women’s Center helps them with all three. Thank you, to those of you who have contributed to the fund that allows me to do this work with them, which I hope is giving them additional skills of self-awareness to help them make this transition.
Our theme for this series is, The Heroine’s Journey, based on the book by the same name. It’s about our spiritual journey as we move away from our mothers and away from our feminine self, experience pain and suffering as a result, and then come back Home again.
I’m struck, when I hold the circle, by how quickly they “get it.” That they notice, and appreciate, the sacredness of the circle, and quickly settle into it.
Below are two found poems they agreed I could publish.
The first is to the prompt, “What do I want to keep that my mother (or grandmother) passed on to me?”
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She Preached Good Posture
She preached good posture.
I can’t let her go.
She sewed my cheerleading outfit.
I can’t let her go.
Being complete is to be whole.
I can’t let her go.
I am needed. I have a job to do.
I can’t let her go.
The love my mother had.
I can’t let her go.
The long suffering my mother endured.
I can’t let her go.
The ability to know when to be a woman.
I can’t let her go.
She had a very kind heart.
I can’t let her go.
I lost the mom I once knew.
I can’t let her go.
I was fortunate to have a second mother.
I can’t let her go.
I can’t separate myself from my mother. I’m her baby.
I can’t let her go.
— Found poem, Women Renewed participants, May 27, 2014
Last week, we read the Poem, She Let Go, by Rev Rose Safire. Read the full poem here. Then we wrote to the prompt, “What do I want to let go of?”
Here’s what I heard:
New Page, New Journey
New page, new journey.
No, no, no, not a new chapter, a new book of life.
Can’t stop, won’t stop.
You can feel that breeze again.
I can see the moon and the stars at night.
I have let that day go.
I’m surprised I have the patience for this.
I won’t give up for anything.
I’m not in this room right now.
The anxiety of the feeling that I may be violated.
I know that God has me.
Trouble is so easy to get into, and so difficult to get out of.
Letting go is not an easy thing to do.
Sometimes you gotta lose to win again.
You gotta take a leap of faith;
Listen to your inner self.
— Found poem, Women Renewed participants, June 2, 2014