Umoja

I wrote this poem years ago after reading a newspaper article on Umoja.  PBS just ran a two-night show called Half of the Sky about women in third world countries.  And I saw Rebecca and Umoja in the show!  It is from my chapbook "Liquid Rubies".

Umoja

Sitting cross-legged on a sisal mat, 

thatched roof and the equator sun above,

Rebecca holds the 13-year-old girl’s hand 

You don’t have to marry that old man 

even if he is my brother.

Rebecca goes house to house

You don’t have to have sex with a man

that beats you, exposes you to HIV,

a husband with other wives.

Shamed by rape then abandoned

Rebecca’s women grow a circle of mud 

and dung huts in parched and barren grassland

and call it Umoja, in Swahili, unity.

A sanctuary for Sarah’s little girl body

from bearing a child that would have shredded

her insides, causing her to leak, to smell,

to be shunned into a beggar’s existence.

No men live in Umoja,

a haven for Mary from circumcision,

mutilated gentials that would have forever 

brought pain and denied pleasure.

In Umoja, children go to school for the first time, 

women work in the cultural center

inviting tourists into the beauty of Kenya,

selling red and white Samburu beaded necklaces.

Rebecca ignores spiteful men setting up

their own village, spying, failing to imitate

Umoja’s success but hiring the men to haul firewood 

as women change the rhythm, the power of a village.

Rebecca throws back her brown cloud of hair, 

laughs at stone throwing and death threats 

as she boards a plane to a world conference on

gender empowerment an ocean away.

If you remain silent no one thinks you have anything to say.