A pause for something a friend posted: A Prayer for Women’s Bodies Let us pray for the sores and the scars, the crooked toes and swaybacked spines, baby-lifting arms and horse-reining hands. Let us linger, lovingly, over chins and chests, breasts and backs, calling each one holy, each one needed, each one as fragile or as sturdy as necessary, love handles no longer maligned, each waist its own territory, own beloved landscape of bruise or bone, wrinkle or fat. Let us honor bone, whether porous or pointy, shattered or submerged, hardworking scaffolding holding us up when gravity and graves could sink us down, freight us with grief, with ghosts of our mothers bodies, grandmothers. Let us sing of the heft of calves, diligence of thighs, knees noted, needed whether knobby, gnarly, girly or knock-kneed, arthritic, achy. Chant a psalm for those delirious hips, undulating bellies rippling to glory, hypnotic, haughty, bared or buried, soft skin sacred, dimpled, speckled, stretched or sunbathed. Give me your last nerve, best follicles, untamed hair and unwashed feet, and I will praise them like I should, not with creams and cures, not with late-night infomercial fervor, but with words, phrases strung out like pearly teeth, each sound anointed, every syllable. Allison Joseph
Posted on: Tue, 01 Apr 2014 16:53:50 +0000
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