The Power of a Southern Woman: A Poem

All women have an amazing strength. All women. We are born with it. It is our inheritance as daughters. It has to be. We are born into a world in which we are required to carry so much.

Pain. The pain of child-birth. The pain of the months our bodies prepare itself for those few times, or that one time, or for some, a possibility that never comes.

Sorrow. The sorrow of the loss of one of those babies, whether as a baby or fully grown or somewhere in-between. The sorrow of the loss of her mother, her first best friend and secret-keeper. The loss of her father, whether she knew him or not. The loss of her husband because so often he goes first and leaves her lonely.

Work. A woman does a work men rarely see, a work most other women don’t see until she starts doing it herself. This work is a secret no man can ever touch. He doesn’t have the hands for it, no matter how soft they are.

Power. Yes, carrying power requires strength. It takes so much strength to use our inherent power. To find our voices. But that power is not tapped by raising our volume but is quiet. And I don’t know anything that will break me faster than quiet, so there is immense power in quiet.

Secrets. When our sisters come to us, they ask us to carry their pain with them. And sometimes this world doesn’t offer justice for our pain and we can’t say it out loud, so we can only use our secret voices and whisper our pain to a confidant that through compassion loves us enough to bare that pain with us so we don’t get buried under it alone.

And all women do this. All women. All over the world. But each woman has her own special power. And the special power of the Southern woman is her grace.

We walk with grace in all we do. Even when we lose our shit, we recover with grace. When we take a fall, we get up and smile, find our strut, and hold our heads high as we make our exit. End scene. We’ll laugh about it over cocktails or wine or coffee, iced tea, or shots.

We are. We exist. We fill space. But we are so much more.

Every woman has the power, tapped or untapped, it’s there. And my hope is to create a future in which girls don’t have to tap these powers until they truly are women.

That is the world we are creating. We are of generations birthing this gift to little girls we may never meet, but they are so worth it. Because we were worth it. And women since forever have been working this very dream with their hands into creation.

So we do our work. With our pain. In secret. In sorrow. Through grace. In power.

And we roar. In silence. In quiet. Out loud.