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  • Thank You for Being a Woman
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Thank You for Being a Woman

Jémima Fiadjoe-Prince Agbodjan

Thank you for being a woman
For having been born
To know the pain of childbirth;
For having nursed my mother’s breast
To know the joy and happiness of offering my milk;
For having been carried on her back
To learn how to strengthen my back
For having known the tenderness of this maternal heart
To learn how to have a child’s heart.

Thank you for being a woman
For being at the school of prudence
Of endurance and of patience
In order to be guardian of the hearth
To insure its protection and fulfilment;
For being a nest of clear and creative thoughts
For being the welcoming earth where grow
The seeds of the future

Thank you for being a woman
For being beauty and softness
For being light and warmth
For being discretion and lobe
And finally, more than anything,
For being born to give,
To give my Peace for the Peace
OF HUMANITY.


Jémima Fiadjoe-Prince Agbodjan

From A Rain of Words: A Bilingual Anthology of Women’s Poetry in Francophile Africa, edited by Irène Assiba d’Almeida (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2009)

translated by Janis A. Mayes

Reproduced by kind permission of the translator.

Tags:

African poetry mothers peace Togo women

About this poem

This poem, representing Togo, is part of The Written World – our collaboration with BBC radio to broadcast a poem from every single nation competing in London 2012.

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Jémima Fiadjoe-Prince Agbodjanb.1950

Jémima Fiadjoe-Prince Agbodjan was born in 1950. She studied medicine at the University of Dakar and then in France at the University of Lille. She works as a pediatrician in Lomé, Togo.
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