Quiet Mountain Essays
Copyright ©; All Rights Reserved by Author
Where Are My Sisters Tonight?
by
Suzanne Sunshower
A woman stands peeling road-mapped potatoes;
zig-zaggedly stripping life down to the core
of a root.
The square root
of a faulty existence.
Thousands of miles away,
a near-sighted woman with a far-away look
is gingerly stepping into mine fields.
She tip-toes through the muddy land,
scooping up precious, life-giving eyes to be properly buried,
so that they might see again in a different world. Elsewhere,
a woman is paring back the earth with famished fingers,
exposing the film in her mind’s eye of empty bowls lined up
like small, swollen bellies, or wide-open mouths
crying beseechingly for sustenance. In a hell
on earth,
a supine woman of the wrong faith prays for succor.
Body writhing beneath her captors, she waits an eternity
for a sign that the world knows her pain.
She wonders: Wouldn’t knowing mean caring?
Doesn’t anyone know?
A woman in Detroit watches at her window. She knows
there are young boys gathered on the next corner,
waiting for their lives to begin...
for death...
for their next victim...
Where they once played ball in the street,
they now dodge fate enshrouded in a steel jacket,
still waiting for someone to call them in
from the storm.
Somewhere in America
a woman is washing brown hands under hot tap water,
scrubbing to peel herself free from the soul sins of the dead;
and of the living;
and of no one person
in particular.
I used to listen to the Evening News calling out from the livingroom, as I prepared supper in the
kitchen. I couldn't see the video clips, I only heard the sound bites. In one year, I heard about
women blown up in mine fields, women and babies starving in Ethiopia, Muslim women being
raped in Bosnia, and of course, the violence I already knew was happening in the streets of
America. This piece was written for the women and children I pictured in my mind on so many
evenings while I was safe and warm at home.
