Getting Off the Couch

We send warm greetings.
We really need them.
If they can’t write, please send photos.
We’re very happy to you, Lisa
And for all the other women, for all the women
who accept to make their bodies suffer because we suffer.
Give our thanks to them, tell them we are together.

Lisa Shannon, depressed,
laid on her couch to watch Oprah.
There on the screen, the women of Congo,
raped by the militia, children killed before their eyes,
elders, whole families gone,
mutilation and torture in every woman’s eyes.
Lisa got up off the couch.
“Don’t think- just go,” demanded her Spirit,
“Your sisters suffer there.”
Danger, danger, everywhere,
and on to Congo she flies, her heart as her guide,
into the most dangerous place for a woman
on Earth.
Lisa gets off the couch, and she flies,
with only her heart as her guide.
She finds the women and the children she calls
“wide-eyed African angels.”
They call her “grandmother”,
though she is thirty-four.
A thousand sisters meet her,
as Lisa runs madly for them all,
with her heart as her guide.

Annelinde Metzner January 10, 2010

To learn more about Lisa Shannon see http://athousandsisters.com/video.
For more information on Congo, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4vpRP6Lmx0&feature=player_embedded