By David F. Rooney
Donald Trump’s inauguration may have happened 24 hours ago and 3,452.6m kilometres to the east, but that did not deter Revelstokians from marching in solidarity with hundreds of thousands of people who marched in about 670 demonstrations around the world from Washington, DC, to Sydney, Australia.
This event, held on a cold, mountain morning Saturday, was organized by Anne Keller. As such it was a short but heart-felt event that saw a few words from Jill Zacharias, folk songs accompanied by Bill Zmaef on guitar and the magnificent recitation of an extremely powerful new poem by Leslie Davidson.
You can watch a short, 17-minute video of this demonstration by activating thre YouTube player at the bottom of this post.
Women of a Certain Rage
By Leslie Davidson
Women of a certain rage
Protest the notion that burning bras
Was the definer of our cause.
It was symbolic liberation
At the birth… the loud gestation
Of a revolution that told the world
That we had brains as well as breasts and wombs
We were too large for kitchen tombs —
Of a struggle that continues to see our sisters, mothers, daughters
In Afghanistan, Iraq and down the street
Silenced in their yearning to seek justice
It is just this
When girls in schools are burned
For defying the tradition
That demands that they stay hidden
We are none of us all right.
When the child torn from loving home and culture
Is shamed for all she cannot be or do
Because there was no one to love or teach her.
We are none of us all right.
When hate and greed walk hand in hand
And violence becomes the stand we take
When you and I cannot agree…
Oh, loved one, don’t you see?
None of us are free.
When ignorance elects a narcissistic prick
Who thinks he has the right to stick
His mitts wherever on our bodies he deems fit
It makes us angry, makes us sick.
We did not march for this!
It never was and will never be just about the bras.
Women of a certain rage
See sad irony and travesty
When majesty like Sojourner Truth or Harriet Tubman
Are less well known than some Kardashian.
Do you know Emily Stowe?… Or Nellie McClung?
How about The Famous Five?
Women who were alive to all the bitter truth
Of an existence that denied equality.
And their persistence changed his to her story, too.
And they are buried in the books
Unless we liberate them
We inflate them back to size
And place them warts and bloomers, faults and pride
Back on the stage of Mother Courage
With all the other wondrous, valiant,
Long-gone women, forgotten women of a certain rage.
Women of a certain rage teach our daughters and our sons
The lesson of their infinite worth
Upon this fragile, battered, finite earth.
We celebrate diversity in all its wondrous manifestations
Womanifestations, gay and lez and bifestatations.
We sing the beauty of every colour, culture, creed
And this is what we need
To love one another.
To find the person in the other
To get our hands into the mess
And hold the unlovely and unloved
Within a selfless love’s caress.
The poet sang, there is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
We women of a certain rage, we shout,
See all our broken places?
That’s how our light shines out.
For in us lives the wisdom,
That speaks this too shall pass
And time will come, as morning comes,
And sorrow yields to mirth
There is a joke in everything…
The wise clown knows it, and the witch.
And, cackling wild, we reclaim glory
For that loudmouthed bitch,
The one who will just not sit down.
We have not seen it all
But we’ve seen much.
And our hands have learned
The touch that heals
And if you tear our heart, we mend.
Our mothers taught us how to sew.
And when you hear our laughter know
Women of a certain rage forgive,
Outlive, all the hurts
That tried to shape us into something less.
We are who we are meant to be
And growing, growing, growing on.
Until we rest, and we shall rest
In our very own profound
And halleluia-ed blessedness.
We women of a certain rage.
