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

sustenance for living

27 sustenance for living She is born of damp mist and early sun. She is born again woman of dawn. She is born knowing the warm smoothness of rock. She is born knowing her own morning strength. “A Breeze Swept Through” –luci tapahonso We are reminded of the very sustenance of our being in the birth of this Navajo child, who “kicked tiny brown limbs. / Fierce movements as outside / the mist lifted as the sun is born again.” With her spirit connected to the emotional and physical world, we evidence the intricate part of the self that finds the substance to thrive. In this chapter, writers gain courage from their own “morning strength.” We begin with the elderly to show how this connectedness with life’s nourishment can span the ages. “In February she was dying again,” begins Naomi Shihab Nye’s “One Moment on Top of the Earth.” The grandmother hasn’t eaten in twenty days, but when she hears that “someone who loved her … flew across the sea” to see her, she wanted soup. Nye writes “being alive was wanting things again.” She was a woman who had almost died, but who “by summer was climbing the steep stairs to her roof to look out over the fields once more,” flowing into Nye’s second piece, “Stain.” It is “the simple love of her difficult place” that nourishes the old woman. Love of family and human relationships also sustains Janice Brazil’s “Grandma.” Her strength comes from the endurance of hard times. Despite death having stolen her loved ones, her strength of being remains. Emerson wrote, “What lies behind us and what lies before us are very tiny compared to what lies within us.” The theme of endurance shaping one’s character continues in “Standing Ground,” where Demetrice Anntía Worley writes of the hardships black men and women faced in a place where “unequal was the norm.” Yet, they stood 28 Risk, Courage, and Women their ground and “protected their families with food, homes, education.” Not only did they pass along the physical sustenance for survival, but like Brazil’s grandmother, they taught the next generation how to endure, “standing with their roots firmly planted.” Legendary stories and songs have always sustained the human condition. In Wendy Barker’s “The Face That,” Helen of Troy moved beyond “the stories of the old women” about “the stale place that kept women inside.” She bowed to love and passion for guidance. The impoverished young pregnant girl in Karen Waldron’s “Down the Dublin Road” has nothing tangible to give her unborn child. Yet, with its fetal kick, “muted resolve awakes a Druid chill” and it is her song that is the sustenance for her baby. For a brief moment, we feel a sense of hope. In “Walking Home,” Susan J. Tweit tries to find harmony and balance in her life. She’s been told that she has a disease that soon will kill her. In pain and confusion, she turns to nature, trying to find the sustenance she needs to survive. When I am stuck and cannot dig myself out of my problems, I go home to nature …. I head for a place where I will be alone and hear myself think, where the noise and busyness of humanity can’t drown out the ‘small still voice’ of my inner wisdom. Instead of experiencing a revelation that would banish her illness, on her journey she learns to listen to her body. She hears her own “tangled feelings, a jumble of anxiety, loneliness, confusion, and anger.” Within the voices of these emotions she reflects that if she can maintain inner harmony instead of going to war with her body, she “might be able to learn what I need to get a grasp on my illness.” Similarly, nature continues to provide sustenance in LoveridgeSanbonmatsu ’s “The Garden of Isabel.” It is in the beauty, “the jewel, the emerald, among the flowers,” that we find the harmony that beckons our return to the natural. This courage of the spirit is intertwined in Ruth Kessler’s poems. “Unlike Cain Angel-Like” and “In the Language of Silence” both speak of the Holocaust, but acknowledge that it is the silence that we hear the loudest. “Imagine” begins her first piece. Imagine the ordinariness or commonplace of lives, the “twining of common roots.” Yet this ordinary woman was no ordinary woman for in “turning a deaf ear to Authority’s orders” she exchanged life for...