Rev. Leona Nicholas Welch is Taking Back Old!

Taking Back Old: Poetry Celebrating Old Women by Leona Nicholas Welch
My rating: 5 of 5 stars        25 May 2023 as “Poetic Expressions” in The Berkeley Times, “Knox Book Beat.”

        Taking Back Old: Poetry Celebrating Old Women appeared at just the right time. Everyone seems to be revving up for the summer Poetry Issue, pow-wows and festivals; and the pandemic Passover is releasing the floodwaters of words, songs and sagas we’d pent up in so many of our journals, letters, poems and zoom meetings.

         God and Goddess help us if we/you have to wander 40 years before reaching The Promised Land of Ecofeminism, Class, World, Species, Religious, Cultural and Racial Respect and Solidarity; the bones of Maya Angelou, Daniel Ellsberg, Rachel Carson and Nelson Mandela (and me, and…) on our/your shoulders like Abraham’s. 

         Rev. Leona Nicholas Welch has awesome Grandmothers, Friends, and is a Mother among mothers -- “Women whose beauty, wisdom, and grace / In old age, inspire me” from her time at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union American Baptist Seminary of the West and African American Methodist Episcopal (AME) churches and beyond.

      “Welch has served and ministered to the elderly for over fifty years,” she says, and she is “Grateful for the aches and the pains/ that let me know/ that I am alive. Notice my stride.” This woman is not wasting time just sittin’ around. She’s got too many awesome Role Models to be “totin’ A ton of bitter black bread/ for every year she’s had….” And tells us “Lay your paper bag down/ let your tale be told.”

         That is the key: trust your story, and use the best of your art and memories to say “I AM STILL HERE.”  

        “This poem is motion, as it is sound. Hear this beautiful old, black woman poem whose meter and beat could have been the anxiety beat of a heart birthing a black child on a cold, rainy night, in an Alabama Backwoods. This poem remembers the hand that started the breath, and it remembers the breath.”

         “my heart moves toward the love in your eyes./ On some mysterious plain between us/ a connection is realized.”

         “Yes, we are old, but our years only/ serve to multiply our determination… / UNITY IS ABOUT TO BE REBORN/ The old women of the world say so.”

Yes, we say so!

Taking Back Old: Poetry Celebrating Old Women, Leona Nicholas Welch, Berkeley, CA, 2022.

https://www.goodreads.com › author › show › 1319428.Leona_Nicholas_Welch

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