Excerpt from In Sorrow (The Seeds of Change) by Susan Jackson

This poem appeared in our July 2013 issue. Read the rest of Susan’s poem and the rest of the journal by downloading it here.

We carry the sorrow
of the mothers
who came before us
we carry the sorrow
of those mothers
and their mothers
the sadness of the old
grandmothers
who tried to carry it alone
We carry in our bodies
in our hearts
in our heart’s body

the sorrow of those whose babies died and those whose mothers died in childbirth,
the woman who grieved for the child she couldn’t heal or the child she couldn’t have,
those whose husbands went to war, those whose husbands beat them, those who
has no power, those whose power isolated them or caused them to be burned as witches,
those who couldn’t read or write, those who wrote in secret or took a man’s name for a pen name,
those who were silenced, those who would not get off the bus or sit in the back of the bus,
those who could not vote or own property or were owned as property, those who tended the farm,
birthed the children, who men were in the mines, the ones who watched history being written,

—

SUSAN JACKSON’S first collection of poems, Through a Gate of Trees, was published by CavanKerry Press in 2007. Finishing Line Press brought out her chapbook All the Light in Between in the Spring of 2013. Susan received a fellowship grant from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Parents of four grown children, Susan and her husband live in Jackson, Wyoming.