To Patience and Sarah

By Beverly Greene

(NOTE: For those who don't know, Patience and Sarah is a fictionalized lesbian love story by Isabel Miller inspired by the lives of two actual women.)

NOTE: This poem is protected by international copyright laws and may NOT be reproduced in any form without Beverly Greene's expressed and written consent.

I thought that I was brave
until I heard about you.
I thought that it was hard
for us in different countries
with only an expensive phone call
to calm our burning spirits.

How vane I must have been
to not think of you and your love
and what you had to endure
simply to be who you were.

How could I not feel in my
collective consciousness
that you were there before me,
tending to womanly love
as you tended your fields?

How blind I must have been
to not have seen that I,
now in a modern age so different
than the one you braved,
am simply following the path
that you and the many women
that loved one another before you
have laid out for us to follow.

But, despite my past folly,
I feel you here with me now,
I see you in my mind's eye,
tending your eternal love still.

Though you never knew the word
for who you were or what your love meant,
I have it at my command now
thanks to your quiet life's journey.

So I will not forget your love
which we all keep alive today
by continuing your brave legacy
of life on our own self-named terms,
of love without appology,
of doing what has to be done
to live and love as proud women.

Though you've been gone
for more than a century,
your love has not died
for I fan your flames of passion
each time I read your story,
I breath life into your love
every time I smile at my wife,
sharing a secret knowledge
that you told us without words
and taught us by example.

I will pass this knowledge on
to those yet to come
and pray that because I have
traveled this still rocky path
where your feet once trod together
with my love at my side,
the women of my future
will find the road
a little easier to travel
when it is their turn
to carry the tourch.

As you before me wore down
the stones set on cutting our feet
with biting words filled with shame,
I will continue your quiet fight
for the right to live and love,
turning stones into pebbles
and the unthinkable into truth.

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� 1999 Beverly Greene owns all rights to this original poem.

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