Passing On Fire

By Joyce Frohn

My grandmother called herself a “tomboy.”
She bragged that she could chop wood and bale hay as fast
as the men.
And then they sat down and read the paper while she baked
fine biscuits and pie.
She loved hunting, motorcycles and gardening.
She raised four children in a boxcar,
teaching the boys to cook and the girls to love learning.
and that dairy farm sent four children to college.

Her daughters called themselves “new women” and “liberated.”
They marched in protests, fought discrimination on the job and
balanced motherhood and jobs.
They aimed for medical school and seminary.
They fought for their children,
you win some, you lose some.

I call myself a “feminist.”
College was assumed.
I love poetry, slime molds and frog cells.
I signed petitions as soon as I could write.
Some days old battles stay on and
sometimes new problems arise.

We’ve fought for so long.
What will my daughter call herself?
Will she be the one to say “woman”?
What battles will she fight?
Her great grandmother holds her small soft hand
in a stiff callused one and passes on the fire.

Joyce Frohn has been published in Nothing Ever Happens in Fox Hollow, Strange Stories, and Page & Spine, among other places. She is married with a teen-aged daughter. She also shares a house with two cats, a lizard and too many dust bunnies.