A Poem. A True-thing.

I came across this poem yesterday – written by Wendell Berry in The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. After spending a weekend with 90+ amazing women leaders, and then reading these words, I was struck by their poignancy, power, and applicability. My comments to follow:

DO NOT BE ASHAMED
You will be walking some night
in the comfortable dark of your yard
and suddenly a great light will shine
round about you, and behind you
will be a wall you never saw before.
It will be clear to you suddenly
that you were about to escape,
and that you are guilty: you misread
the complex instructions, you are not
a member, you have lost your card
or never had one. And you will know
that they have been there all along,
their eyes on your letters and books,
their hands in your pockets,
their ears wired to your bed.
Though you have done nothing shameful,
they will want you to be ashamed.
They will want you to kneel and weep
and say you should have been like them.
And once you say you are ashamed,
reading the page they hold out to you,
then such light as you have made
in your history will leave you.
They will no longer need to pursue you.
You will pursue them, begging forgiveness.
They will not forgive you.
There is no power against them.
It is only candor that is aloof from them,
only an inward clarity, unashamed,
that they cannot reach. Be ready.
When their light has picked you out
and their questions are asked, say to them:
“I am not ashamed.” A sure horizon
will come around you. The heron will begin
[her] evening flight from the hilltop.

I love this. And as I read it first yesterday and then again just now, I am struck by the reality that it’s written by a man – and yet feels so like my own reality as a woman; like the reality of so many women I know. Though it’s insipid, unspoken, and almost impossible to name, women feel like they are being asked to say they are ashamed – of their power, of their beauty, of their brilliance, of their ideas, of their strength, of their opinions, of their will, of their volition, of their very selves. And they/we know the pressure and pain inherent in those places too numerous to count or name sometimes.

But many of us also know what it means to have “candor;” to have an “inward clarity, unashamed, that they cannot reach;” to choose, finally, to say, “I am not ashamed” and then to fly free.

I am not ashamed: a true thing. May it always be so.

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