The Power and Weakness of Words

I don’t have it in me to write something uplifting or informative, light or funny. But I do want to recognize the incredible abilities and skills we have as grant professionals including the often dismissed or diminished skill of documenting. Just as important is the ability to take a complex topic or program or issue and distill it, explain it, put it into words that will compel funders, grant reviewers, individual donors.

It’s something I’ve done for decades now, but in the past week, these abilities and skills have not helped me explain or define or offer solutions to what’s going on. They’ve done nothing to lighten my heart or quench my rage.

Instead, I wanted to offer someone else’s words. An award-winning poet. A widowed mother…murdered. Her name is Renee Nicole Good, and she was 37 with a six-year-old son.  Here’s a snippet of her poem “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” which won the 2020 Academy of American Poets Prize.

  “now i can’t believe—

               that the bible and qur’an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to & exhaling from their mouths “make room for wonder”—

You can find the rest of the poem HERE.