She Speaks to the Woman Within
My friend Jackie Dove-Miller is a poet and a spoken word artist. She writes about things that matter to women. She gets into the heart and soul of what women feel. Her voice is the voice of a best friend, a mother, a pastor, a teacher, a counselor. She tells us to re-examine who we think we are, to stop listening to those voices telling us we are not good enough, because we are women who CAN. I met Jackie when we were volunteers for the Obama campaign in 2008. We quickly learned we both were writers and I invited her to a writers’ group meeting. She shared her poems and they made me cry. How did she, a black woman, know this white woman’s truth? Jackie’s words show that we women share a common truth that transcends race, culture, or background. Sometimes the words are laced with humor, to help us bear our internal truths, and then the eternal truth shines through, that we are ALL God’s children. That knowledge lifts us up out of despair and hold us up as we walk forward, na