Courage Is Her Crown: Poem

Baobab Summit 2019

The 2019 Baobab Summit theme’s are courage, connections, and creativity. Scholars will spend three days exploring how courage, connections, and creativity, can manifest in day-to day-actions to empower others, challenge norms, and defy expectations. We asked Scholars to share their ideas, in essays or poetry, on how courage is an essential element to transformational leadership, and personal and societal change.

A child on her back, a hoe in her hand

The sun is high and the field is big,

Slowly but untiringly she breaks the ground

Sweat on her brow,

Her will is her drive

It’s what she carries on her shoulders day in and out,

What will the child drink if she will not dig?

She pursues each day with a smile on her face

She faces each moon with hope in her eyes,

Courage is her crown and she wears it like a queen.

Her daughter’s father,

From the war he did not survive,

The war in the north which took all her family and friends,

Not then, not now did she ever wince,

Not then, not now did she find comfort in tears,

No she is a woman of hope

Courage is her crown and she wears it like a queen.

She woke up today

With pain in her back,

Her hands are weak, her bones stifle a crack,

She does not wince or cry,

She carries her hoe and goes to work,

She is a child of the universe,

She knows there is love,

To fight for a better world, where her child can thrive,

So she doesn’t give up

Does not cry,

Because, Courage is her crown and she wears it like a queen.