Dear readers,
Your patience in waiting for a new post has paid off–The Women of Letters is unbelievably proud and grateful to present a new poem by Professor Lorna Goodison of the University of Michigan, a distinguished poet from Jamaica who is renowned the world over!  I hope you will be encouraged to read more of her work, for her poetry is very accessible. Professor Goodison is a true woman of letters, and her poem for TWOL is of an especially relevant subject: the Boko Haram kidnapping of schoolgirls, young women who are being denied their right to become women of letters.

***********************************************************************************

We to the World: Bring Back Our Girls!
Reply from the world: They are your girls, not ours.

Memo to the World:
Armies have not yet managed
to spring our stolen school girls
from that pack of barking mad loco haram .
To remind you, here is a snapshot of them:

In this picture we see our lost girls swathed
in rough regulation grey dress.
From afar they look like wooden vessels
seized on a storm-tossed sea;
or a school graduation group portrait
from bad luck’s let them down academy.