Poem In Your Pocket Day

Tomorrow is  Poem In Your Pocket Day,  The idea is simple: you select a poem you love and then you carry it with you to share with co-workers, family, and friends.  Here is the poem that will sit in my pocket  tomorrow:

Holding My Beads   

    
Unforgiving as the course of justice

 Inerasable as my scars and fate

 I am here

 a woman….with all my lives strung out like beads

                                                 before me

It isn’t privilege or pity

that I seek
It isn’t reverence or safety

quick happiness or purity

                             but

the power to be what I am/a woman

charting my own futures/  a woman

holding my beads in my hand

                                            -by Grace Nichols