Poetry – Page 16 – Feminism and Religion

You Can Make Your Own Rose BOOK REVIEW by Lila Moore

You Can Make Your Own Rose by Andrea Nicki is a collection of poems infused with the spirit of feminist sensibility, social justice and activism. The poems offer more than mere therapeutic comfort while depicting shamanic-inspired healing rituals and magical encounters. They are trauma-free in the sense that Nicki doesn’t ask for our sympathy nor does Nicki simply wish to share traumatic memories. On the contrary, she utilizes somewhat analytical and educational language, interlaced with subtle picturesque and lyrical details alongside a severe social critique, to depict the emotional, intellectual, and social landscape of her reflections on incest and other gender-related forms of abuse.

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Poem: #MeToo, We Re-Member by Marie Cartier

I need the grandmothers to help me

re-member my rage.

Cross stitch. Double knot. I sew it back on. The raggedy parts I let fly loose

when I thought it was OK to not be “so angry.”

“Boys will be boys.”

And so then, girls will be angry.

And we will re-member—our rage.

I need the great aunts, and all the old women with the signs that read,

“We are still protesting this shit.”

I need them, this herstory to help me

re-member my rage, feel it strong and tight. Cross stitch. Double knot. Those women re-member

me. I am that woman. She is me.

Our rage is a song.

After all this time, we are still singing it. Our rage

is a river and we swim in it, even if it’s upstream. There is a fierce mermaid goddess,

Yemaya. She protects us. She knows

our rage is our best defense.

Our rage is a

swarm of bees. Not yet extinct. Our rage

is holy. Terror. Continue reading “Poem: #MeToo, We Re-Member by Marie Cartier”

Singing up the Dawn, a poem by Sara Wright

My walk to the river
is a joyful entrance
into the eternal Now.
The water flowing,
crushed fresh mint,
trilling bird song
desert air so sweet
my body vibrates
drumming with all that is…

Returning under
the bowing cottonwoods
I touch a heart shaped leaf
in reverence…
For Life. Continue reading “Singing up the Dawn, a poem by Sara Wright”

Death and Re-birth through a Project by Elisabeth Schilling

For about a year and a half, I have been working on a collection of poetry that I feel is worth something. I have been writing poetry since I scribed pages hidden between my math textbook when I was 9, gone through poetry workshops in graduate school where I produced a creative thesis, and continued to write off-and-on after that. I have an extensive cornucopia of poetry, but it was around last October of 2016, perhaps, that I decided to write my experience.

As a pre-teen, I wrote about what I thought my life could be, fantasizing about being an older woman with mottled relationships, missing opportunities to discuss my fragile relationship with my parents as the only-child-golden-child, my passion and doubts as a religious, my shame at not being more experienced. Even when I was in graduate school for poetry in Ohio, I didn’t think my life was worth excavating. I wrote dreamy, dense poetry that was surreal and symbolic but largely incoherent. I could again have written about my evolving religious beliefs, my curiosities and risks I took living outside of my home state of Oklahoma as a young woman for the first time, my declining relationship with my mother, or my insecurities again, but this time as a lesser-prepared graduate student in comparison with my literary and theory-laden colleagues.

On one hand, some might say the culture I come from is narcissistic and navel-gazing. I would agree, but just like I feel women can sometimes be selfish in a quite necessary and liberating way (as opposed to those around her accusingly saying she is “so selfish” for abandoning them/following her own path/needing a room of her own), I feel the confessional and self-reflective can be the healing and helpful side of the coin. For me, at least in my experience, my “finished” collection feels exactly this way.

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Haiku Getaway by Esther Nelson

One of my undergraduate professors was (and still is) a haiku enthusiast. When I took his Zen Buddhism course, students were required to write haiku throughout the semester. He encouraged us to focus on the natural world as we struggled to come up with three lines of seventeen syllables, arranged in a five-seven-five pattern. I eventually discovered lots of pleasure creating a haiku poem—crisp, even stark—using words with a precision I found beautiful.

I recently spent some time in North Carolina (from the Outer Banks to Asheville), treating myself to a short vacation after finishing up the Spring semester. In spite of good intentions, I have failed over and over again to keep a detailed journal while traveling. On this trip, I made a vow to write at least one haiku a day. I kept that vow.

Writing haiku daily forced me to be mindful of my surroundings, reflect on my experience, and then use carefully-chosen words to capture the moment. That mindfulness created a glue of sorts, anchoring me in time and place. To my delight, have found this trip lingering in my memory in ways that other trips have not. Continue reading “Haiku Getaway by Esther Nelson”

The Blessing of Spiritual Direction by Elise M. Edwards

Five years ago, I moved to Texas from California. In that time, my spiritual practice and my feminist and womanist worldview has grown through contemplative practices. It’s ironic. “Everything’s bigger in Texas!” the saying goes, but in the presence of big, sweeping landscapes and open skies, big storms, and big egos, I’ve found the sacred in the small things. I have deepened my connection to God through a small group of women who practice group spiritual direction.

This past Sunday evening, I gathered with these women at my church for our spiritual direction group. We sat comfortably in a circle, relaxing on a couch and chairs around a coffee table, as the evening sun streamed in from a large picture window and lit the room. As we read a passage from the Bible (Mark 3:34-35) in which Jesus looks at the people sitting around him and says, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother,” I saw my companions more clearly. Although my eyes were closed, I had a vision of these women sitting around me, halos made of sunbeams shimmering over their heads. I thought, “Here are my sisters!”

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Wild Snail Festivals by Molly Remer

“It’s a wild snail festival out here!”
—Tanner (age 3)

This spring we took a family mini vacation to Table Rock Lake, about three hours away from home.

At its best, working and schooling from home with our family of six feels like a beautifully seamless integration of work and life—there is no need to compartmentalize or draw distinctions between “life” and “work,” because it is ALL just life and living. At its worst, it feels like the work bleeds into everything else in an all-consuming way and the to-do list just never ends and something or someone is always getting overlooked or shortchanged. We find that it is helpful for us all sometimes to just all step away and be somewhere else, while the to-do list stays at home! We try to take at least five family adventures/trips a year (some of them small and some more involved).

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Creation by Sharon Humphries-Brooks

It seems to me to be appropriate that since I’ve received so many ideas to consider, wondrous gifts, and thought-provoking insights from many of the essays, poems, and stories in the Feminism and Religion blogs, I should also give something in return. One of the most precious gifts that I can offer is my writing. So. . .

A bit ago, I started working on the book Mushente. It takes place, among other locales, on a planet called—you guessed it—Mushente. Many people who live there “walk” in the Mushente Way. Below, I’ve copied the poem that opens that work. As you can see, I’ve been very influence by a feminist interpretation of early Taoism. Continue reading “Creation by Sharon Humphries-Brooks”

“The Burning Lava of a Song” by Joyce Zonana

Aurora’s autobiographical narrative is a passionate paean to poets as the “only truth-tellers, now left to God”; she celebrates them as agents for personal and social transformation. As we come to the end of this National Poetry Month in the U.S., where truth is under siege, it’s worth recalling Aurora Leigh and its daring exploration of poetry, gender, divinity, and social justice.

jz-headshot I was in graduate school when I first read Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s fiery 1856 epic about a young woman claiming her vocation as a poet despite Victorian society’s patriarchal strictures. The poem was not on any assigned reading-list; I’d simply stumbled across it while doing research for my dissertation. The opening lines brazenly assert the speaker’s authority and ambition:

OF writing many books there is no end;
And I who have written much in prose and verse
For others’ uses, will write now for mine,–
Will write my story for my better self . . .

Encountering those words, I was immediately possessed by Aurora’s voice and vision, a welcome change from all the male poets and critics I’d been reading. I devoured the verse novel’s nine books in one night. The poem became the centerpiece of my dissertation, and I studied and enthusiastically taught it for years.

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A Dream Home by Joyce Zonana

Forty years ago, I abandoned my own inner quest to establish myself as a writer/translator, discouraged by the voices of publishers who told me the book was unmarketable, worried about making a living and reassuring my family (whom I had broken from when I was seventeen) that I was “okay.” I chose the relatively safer path of becoming an English professor, and I worked for more than thirty years helping others to find their voices. I do not regret taking that path. It has led me here.

jz-headshot I wake up each morning in a simple bedroom lit by the rising sun: a wardrobe, a bookshelf, a small wooden table, and a chair, arranged on painted plank floors. Just outside the window behind my head are the tallest trees I have ever seen, their grey-brown trunks growing straight up into a sky I cannot quite make out from my warm bed, with its white cotton sheets, white coverlet, and cozy down comforter. The room’s soft yellow walls reflect and amplify the winter light. Part of me wants to luxuriate, to lie here for hours, feeling the sun on my face as I gaze up at the trees and allow my consciousness slowly to return from dreams.

Yet I am here not simply to luxuriate but to work . . . in the next room is a desk, two desks actually, piled with books, folders, dictionaries, my HP Laser Jet printer, and my tiny laptop. From this room too, I can look out on woods and fields on three sides. Best of all, from the desk where I work, I can watch the sun set in the late afternoon.

Sunrise and sunset. And in between, a day entirely to myself, a day when I can work and dream at leisure, but during which I also feel impelled to stay on task, to complete the project that brought me here. Continue reading “A Dream Home by Joyce Zonana”