Risk, Courage, and Women: Contemporary Voices in Prose and Poetry

seams of our lives

165 seams of our lives I am a part of all that I have met. “Ulysses,” by alfred, lord tennyson Far greater than the tiny seams in sewing are the invisible ones that bind parts of our lives together intricately with those of others. They also appear where different aspects of one’s own life are tied together to form a continuity of life’s cycles. The expansiveness of these pieces forms a rich tapestry. Gail Hosking Gilberg begins this chapter with her poem, “Traveling Words.” She created from her own ache, “language / whispered in solitude.” Yet, “transmitted like light / on its own journey,” her words became vital in binding her to another writer. Such threads bind not only our lives together, but can form the fragile connection between life and death. In her piece, “Jared Found,” Bert Kruger Smith initially shuts down because of her tremendous ache over the loss of her son. Convinced that Jared is just missing, in her distressed state she says, “A sixyear -old can’t get lost forever.” This is a story where life and death are woven together, where mourning and celebration are closely connected by a jagged edge. She can develop the courage to re-connect with the love of her husband and remaining children only when she finds that, through love, Jared will always be part of her being. Nanette Yavel’s “The Pinochle Game” demonstrates what happens when the connection is lost between mental illness and mental health. Sarah was twenty-four, a brilliant young psychologist, “ready to … become the healer she always knew she was.” Yet, at this point she lost touch with reality and was institutionalized, medicated to keep her quiet. Her story is about giving strength to others, about understanding and being understood. Through a deck of Pinochle cards, she skillfully provides the therapeutic relationship the patients need. Yet, because she relies on her heart, or intuition, she lacks credibility and her efforts are suppressed by traditional medical attitudes. Agreeing with this frequent denial of intuition as binding us together, Ruth Kessler portrays the “False Prophet.” Instead of believing that our heart 166 Risk, Courage, and Women can teach us things beyond “anything we have ever dared dream,” we don’t trust it. Even “when handed a sunlight— / sun and light, hope and grace,” we deflect the ray, choosing “a leader who is bound to betray us.” Her words underscore how denying our spiritual connectedness dooms us to failure. We see the community of lives in Janice Brazil’s poem, “Purple Passion.” Smiling from within while watching children playfully tossed into a pool by their fathers, perhaps the old woman is remembering a time when she too was thrown over her father’s shoulder into a pool. Or maybe she just likes being around other people. This is about the authenticity of life, the joining of the young and the old. Instead of withering away, she is “Regal in a suit of purple passion” as she “continues to sip her sweet wine, cooled / by the splashes.” Hilda Raz’s “Stock” begins with illness. We watch the sons sit with their seriously ill father, tending to him “in silence, the family way.” Yet Raz reflects throughout that tending is most often women’s work. When she herself becomes deathly ill due to a virus, she questions who will tend her. We see how her life fits with those around her as she continues to explore the dimensions of the real self and its relationship with family, despite gender and religious differences, illness and death. In their new book, her son wants her to write only about herself, but she’s not sure. She writes, “one of the four pillars of our story, rests directly in all its heavy weight on my daughter Sarah, who wasn ’t Aaron until s/he was thirty years old.” In exploring the many facets of the self, Raz tells a stream of stories that weave their lives into a tapestry of humanity and acceptance. In “Facing Masks,” Wendy Barker also explores the hidden faces of our private selves. The mask-maker has produced hundred of masks, some with lines “like blood running through them, / some made of lace, delicate / as expensive underthings.” The voice asks, “What kind of man is he/ to know so many faces?” She wonders what she would do if he “would loosen / all her old tight masks, / take them off.” Whom would she find? She longs to reconnect with...