Poetry by Alexandra Newton Rios
This is how a woman
grows into her own.
She takes the moon that for too long
she only saw in another hemisphere
hang full and white in the night sky
turning into day.
She takes the sun rises with which she runs
and the sun sets behind the Statue of Liberty
with which she ends her day.
She takes the students who suddenly smile
as she works each day
the fields of their hearts
as she once walked the moist earth rows
of her five children’s dreams.
She takes the man she is going to meet
who has been waiting and waiting
and waiting for her to free herself from her past,
from her present overflowing with possibility
to become finally open fully to him.
It is a busy life.
It is a woman’s life.
She takes the sudden focusing,
this giving herself a season
to learn more
to focus more
to do more
to reach a new plane
of being alive.
Change is real.
Real the ways of being in the world.
They should not be menospreciado,
belittled, thought any less of
while it snows the softest of flakes
across the day.
Alexandra Newton Rios, a bi-hemispherical mother of five, lives with her mother in New York City teaching Spanish, and English in San Miguel de Tucumán. She ran eight full Argentine marathons and the New York City Marathon for the joy of having her Argentine mother, a cancer survivor, at the finish line.
Author’s Note: Ser mujer in Spanish means to be a woman in English. The Ser Mujer poems are written once a year on March 8, International Women’s Day, written since 1996, and gather in a poem a definition that changes across time.
