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BEA WILLIAMS: The poets will be reading their work on this program, dedicated today to one of the great women's rights pioneers, Susan B. Anthony, whose birthday is tomorrow. Our poets who have been writing on their own for years but are also sort of the founders of a group calling themselves the Women Poets of the Twin Cities.

Not unlike Susan Anthony's desire to establish the right of women to the vote and thereby to become recognized citizens with impact on the political scene, the Women Poets group began with the desire of a few women poets to establish the right of the women to a voice and to reveal the quality and validity of that voice and thereby to exercise impact as recognized writers on the literary scene, especially in regard to the local poetry activities where we felt we were, for all public and other essential purposes, being left voiceless as well as powerless.

These activities were with only very rare exceptions, involving and/or being controlled by men only. We first organized about a year and a half ago, and we like to believe we've caused at least the beginnings of some change in recognition. The guitarist is not a member of this group yet, although she would be most welcome to be, but she is a writer also and that she has written her own lyrics and many are-- some that have to do with a woman's experience, I understand, and she has composed her own music, which she will be presenting today.

I'm not going to introduce each poet and the singer, partly because I sometimes say things that the person might rather have left unsaid or maybe do it incorrectly, but mostly because it seems like this is the time now that it's important for each woman to learn to speak her name out loud and clear and to say who she is and who she's becoming and how she's trying to be this individual entity. I think it's a rather difficult thing for some of us, and I know it is for myself.

I'm going to start it off by saying that I am Beryle or better known probably as Bea Williams. I was born in Iowa, farm girl from a very large family. I'm a mother of a busy family, containing both boys and a girl, wife of a professor, and a volunteer teacher and community worker. These things may not seem very important, but I feel that they have a lot to do with molding me, not only as a person but as a poet, that I like to believe I also am, before and after and perhaps forever. All these other things have passed away.

Also as part of my philosophy about poetry, I feel that one must have a touchstone in experience and if the truth of what you're saying is to really touch anyone or any generation as truth in your poetry. The first poem that I'm going to read today is, "Will You Miss Me?"

Some days, I manage not to be a poet.

In fact, some days manage me so far from poetry I think I've reached a static state.

Therefore, I know it can be done.

You will come home happily to find me stirring first course soup, smell yeasty pungence of home-made bread.

My hair will be smooth, my face bright like a blank sheet of paper waiting for your kiss, your days experienced to be written upon it.

The house will blind you with its shine you will find no scraps of recorded thoughts.

No stones, petals or curled leaves that hold the images of a dozen poems.

And even if a day may come when the sun casts strange blue-edged shadows on the snow, the wind snags a new note or carries back some old, old sound I had forgot.

I will turn my eyes and ears away, be chauffeur, housemaid, nursemaid, mistress, be your good wife.

I will not clutter your life with sharp pronged faceted fragments of whoever I might have been.

I will pour my love into the lives of our children and ignore the enchanted unclaimed child tapping forever at my window.

Ignore slant raise, stare at the sun until I am blind to the difference of days, of selves.

Be your simple woman, your mirror, my back held hard against the poem, pretend away the blue-rimmed shadows.

This next poem has to do with a feeling I've had for a long time. I think that it's sort of a bad thing to be a poet and especially a woman poet. I mean, we've been sort of led to believe this is sort of a queer character, a strange animal to be. And it's bad enough to be a poet, perhaps it's maybe bad enough to be a woman. But to be both is a difficult thing. And I've titled this "Sheep Clown in the Court of Dreams." And I've prefaced the poem with a little quote from Shakespeare's Hamlet, where he's preparing the play that will expose the truth.

He said, "And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them."

She did not know what she was.

Sometimes she heard herself like skipping bits of a fractured song,

Sometimes gushing like a waterfall fed by spring thaw.

Sometimes she lay fallow and dry as an old creek bed, carved by relentless winds and snake trails.

And then again, she knew herself to be the deep dark river, flowing powerfully toward the sea.

Or she would find herself stumbling along a lean old polar bear, seal bone snagged and dripping life drops with every faltering step,

Suddenly alarmed at becoming a gull, sweeping up from the white fur to soar arcing toward sun.

What did it all mean?

What do you mean they would all scream at her?

"I don't know, I don't know," she would moan and become a locked-jawed book, she could not close herself,

Or sometimes a magic writing tablet, dark with strange scrawled notes from a scarcely legible hand.

"How can I tell you," she would whisper.

Even if I knew, my voice might squeak like a woman's, meaning collapsed before mockery.

You will have to read me, translate before the transparent page is ripped off and all this dreaming lost.

This next one is just a little friendly poke at my husband. He has a habit of falling asleep very easily. And I'm going to read "Suburban Safari."

I would go a whaling but I'm moored in the middle of my living room, not a harpoon to my name, only Bach, Johann Sebastian.

The unbuilt fire crackles from behind the screen, unlit, pretending flame.

You sit three brooding lines, two graying sideburns, and a few pounds away from a Hemingway.

I beg jungles and Kilimanjaro's out of your sleep-slit eyes, I get Arctic icebergs.

The roaring I mistake for spring breakup is your snoring.

Bach transcends it, I try.

I find that my husband takes the brunt of jokes and so forth quite a bit in my poetry reading. And I don't really mean it to happen that way because he's really a very nice sort of person. And yet I find this happening more and more as I tend to take the stage. And I discovered that it has something to do, I think, with finally taking the stage after we know who has had the stage so long. And this next letter-- or this next poem rather is sort of by way of a letter to my husband following a poetry reading. And I've called him Fang here after Phyllis Diller's mythical husband who takes the brunt of her jokes.

Dear good, kind, understanding Fang,

Tonight on the stage, I read a few poems written to you and some about you,

And told a few homilies in between lines, cracked a few asides.

And somehow, you came out looking funny.

It wasn't that I lied, I didn't dream you up like Phyllis, a mythical clown to make sport of.

I told you real.

It's just that my audience looked at you, a fuzzy backdrop for me center stage and said, "He's a comic character."

I mean, their laughter said it.

I never thought of you as all that funny until my audience said it.

Of course, I know it was a spotlight on me that kept you half in shadow.

They saw you only in relation to me, and you cavorted, unknowingly poor soul like a silly court jester since I didn't allow the whole you out.

Being a half person, as it were, you became a comic scenario,

A grotesque sideshow to be shrugged away with a laugh, attention being drawn to the main act, this time me.

It wasn't with malicious forethought.

It wasn't that is my conscious intention to reverse the order of things.

And if it helps any now, man, I feel with you back there.

Just try to remember it's all really in the name of love.

Your woman.

This next poem is written with regard to a young poet who was a member of the group earlier and who has dropped out. And I feel that the Women's movement does tend to fraction people, severely in some cases, but it's something I think that must be gone through. And this is called "Poets Chorus."

Stay, Lita.

Stay in your chiseled ice palace.

Where we may lead you, fires burned through all the long nights,

And nothing, nothing stays hard against them,

No walls so firm, so sacred, they escaped the fierce probing of the leaping searing fingers,

All come cracking sizzling down.

We offer a place here beside us in dark corners where you may lean only on space.

We divulge secrets that are your own, wisely kept hidden.

Boundaryless, you can dance far as flaming fragments.

Keep your distance, Lita, keep something whole, exact, cold as a winter moon.

I think I'll read just one more poem. This is titled "For Michelle" and needs no introduction.

Once when she was ill, I said your sister's bed was an island.

You, gentle child, tread water.

Michelle, Michelle, how can I tell you what I know of ground,

How it swells from within, not beneath floundering feet?

You, fair skinned, silken-haired, blue eyes, dreaming castles out of crumbled houses, have more than dream power as your legacy.

Borne out of untold yearnings, you name them by becoming.

You are the dream, the impossible come true.

Oh, feather soft child, unfold your wings and fly.

PENNY: Watch the cats on their aimless rounds all the holy morning.

If they follow the sun, allow themselves to sleep where they fall, they have no romantic visions.

My name is Penelope [? Cees, ?] mostly known to my cronies as Penny, but that name Penelope has been recently just coming out. I've repressed it since grade school. The first three poems I'm going to read are short things that have come out of solitude and come out of mainly sitting around, wanting to write but not really having much to say. The first is called "Room," and it's dedicated to Virginia Woolf, though I haven't read the book.

Room, to have it and having it, to be able to fill it,

And in filling it, to be capable of emptiness.

A familiar place becomes transparent.

There are no poems here because I am not here.

Pores enlarged through old inspection float me out with no effort.

In fact, I have no will to concentrate in this room.

Sit, and watch the cats on their aimless rounds all the holy morning.

They follow the sun, allow themselves to sleep where they fall.

They have no romantic visions.

This poem is something I wrote, which is unlike most of my poems, in that the person that is speaking, the "I" in the poem is not myself. This was written as something of an experiment for another person, for a woman.

Sometimes when I go to the mailbox in the morning, it seems to me that I am like a thin white envelope,

Someone has filled sealed and forgotten to address.

Yet I've come 200 miles with my freight, penciling in tentative destinations.

I did not expect to be delivered into this void.

I cannot see beyond it, to another time when I will be less full of myself.

Perhaps when my contents are disclosed, some clues will arise, connecting origins with hopes

But now, having no visible future, I feel a twin to my unborn child,

As though my womb were inverted protectively to include us both.

I have a group of poems that I've dedicated to a former roommate of mine. And her name is Jose, and I think of these as the Josie poems.

Prologue: My friend changed her name.

She was Joe Cook when I first knew her, then married Tim Devlin.

Her paintings from college hang on my walls.

They were done by Joe Cook.

On the back of each, it says so, her maiden name, the one that came from her father.

Joe got married, and I think she stopped painting.

She was married Joe Devlin, Jose to her husband.

She had his name then, everything changed.

Now, two children, and four years later, Joe writes to me,

"I'm going back to Jose Cook."

And I finally feel like, well, it's too hard to explain all the changes I'm going through right now.

"Jose, April 1972, Part 1."

After almost four years, we are together again.

Our relationship, a piece of needlework resumed.

When I look closely, and I do, the pieces have not quite joined.

You have stretched larger, must carefully gather your fullness to match my row.

The count of stitches is off, you've taken two steps to my one.

I'm spread thin, feeling that you can see through me.

"Part 2."

When we bicycled to the walker, I rode in the lead,

Enjoying your dependence on my knowledge of the city because I felt so far behind you in other ways.

That last gray afternoon, you said, "One more day, and I'd know my way around."

But there wasn't that day.

Everything went wrong, but it didn't matter.

Our apologies were only knots in the fabric, like the ones that anchor the top of a quilt to the back.

I wish we could have been easier with each other,

But even four of these 20th century years couldn't unravel that much of our hard-learned control.

"Part 3"

You left a few days before spring hit Minnesota, too soon,

But that's always been the way.

You left Avon to get married.

Later, the three of you, you were three by then, left the country.

A lot has happened in four years but nothing to erase the feel of living with you and Lita,

Those last few months before we graduated.

With maybe one exception, those days were the best of my life.

I was filled with music and the colors of your paintings.

The three of us were independent women, artists.

We met together afternoons, ate your good food in the evening,

Talking, talking, everything was within reach.

We had the magazine, friends, accomplishments.

From there, my life fell and broke into fragments.

Your recent visit is still another piece in the patchwork.

I wish I could call it quits, finish the design, bind on the border, and flesh the quilt thick with living.

I'm tired of patching and piecing and mending.

Epilogue: Rain.

The rain came down that day we went to the Amazon bookstore.

We were Amazons, drenched in rainforests but pushing on to where we wanted to go.

Suddenly, the slogging turned to fun when you looked at me and I looked at you, mirrored, laughing.

The next poem that I want to do is one that came to me when I went to a reading about two years ago and discovered that of the 10 poets reading, all of them were men. It was a little bit difficult to take. It's called, "You Old Poets."

Men with wives in the audience, or worse, they are at home, pregnant,

Dully waiting, tucked away in a far corner of your mind.

And you can go freely to drunken late parties to brag of your fecundity.

These quiet drained women, every one of them is thin,

And their face is marked with days and nights and longer periods of your silence when you were writing.

Children cling to them, demanding water, sleep, love,

But you are far away at these times,

Perhaps with other women, who laugh, not knowing what it is to be a poet,

Only feeling the one certainty of their own beauty.

What do the wives feel at home with the children you've gotten them, so you could write about fatherhood?

Did they realize what they were getting into?

Does any wife?

Poets wives bear additional burdens, I think.

They must endure constant reminders in the shape of husband's words in print,

Of the fact that they are not allowed to do more than serve.

And then maybe on a little upbeat, I've got something of a marriage poem. But I don't think it's conventional marriage. It's called, "Of Spaces."

To marry does not mean to merge, like rivers lost upon the ocean,

Not to merge but touch across the space between,

the way the moon and tide strain across space, not lost upon space but reaching to touch.

The light upon the ocean deceives, showing us a moon become water, as though night did not intervene eternally,

Two becoming one, as if tides could turn in wide and wider spiral to seek and fill the emptied ocean beds upon the moon,

And water become moon in spite of weight and miles.

But they are married well, moon and water, though they only draw each other on, never mingling.

What spaces there are remains sacred.

I have two rather short poems, which came out of dreams, which is a very fruitful source for me, neither of them. Well, the first one doesn't have a title.

I dreamed a dream of trees.

I am lying on my back, looking up, roots snarl on my belly,

They are growing over my body, pinning my arms and legs to Earth.

I see trunks rise up to spreading limbs that move with the wind.

I am lying on my back.

My hair streams out and is lost in the grass.

I have been this way since I shed my clothes.

It was my fault, the seed was mine.

Now, I remain until the trees fall.

"Naked Lunch."

Dreamed of a meal at which my father ate all the pith from a kettle of pea soup, leaving clear hot water for me.

JANELLE HONGOS: My name is Janelle Hongos, and I'm going to sing some songs, which I wrote.

(SINGING) I was very, very young girl, a girl of 16 years

I met a boy who took my heart and I gave him all I could

His name was Raymond Anthony, I didn't know much more

I never told a soul it was his baby at my womb

Oh, where is my baby?

Oh, where is she now?

I carried her name Rose, and I held her only once

My mother sent me to home to hide my ugly shame

And they're all worked on hands and knees till the day the baby came

They made me sign a paper, give my child away

I often wondered if she knows the place that I have been

Oh, where is my baby?

Oh, where is she now?

I carried her name Rose, and I held her only once

That was 27 years ago, my child was born to me

I never saw her face again or even Anthony

I know the years keep flying by, I'll never be consoled

For the boy who took my heart, love, and joy took my soul

Oh, where is my baby?

Oh, where is she now?

I carried her name Rose, and I held her only once

I carried her name Rose, and I held her only once

MARY ELLEN SHAW: I'm Mary Ellen Shaw, recent student, newly one of those odd animals known as bright gals in offices, who strangely enough are gals even in their mature '50s. My poems are less a scream of rage or even a fist in the air than they are my own simple statements of humanity. This is only my own voice, I feel, and there is a time for screaming. The first few are from a recent thing I've done called "The American Dream Thing Cycle."

A poem to the passenger pigeon,

I feel very close to you dear.

I'm feeling rarer and rarer myself.

Some day, I'll fade as scanty and scarce as the last buffalo in the Pocatello Zoo.

Will they print glossy books about me, full of sentiment and a hushed-over murderous glee?

It wasn't me, I tell you.

Will I make somebody money?

Will I cause one child in the final analysis to become vegetarian and not wear hats?

What is the dream?

To own both what is needed and not.

We're full of contradictions.

We want to be one of the crowd but above it.

We want to beat out the other guy but save him,

well, only if his morals prove he deserves it.

No one qualified charity allowed, and anyway it's taken out of taxes.

We want to give full measure of equality to everyone.

But colored people are lazy, Indians drink.

And women ought to stay home and have babies.

Why else did God give them holes for anyway? I ask you.

We want both freedom and to be told what to do, to be assured that someone else is thinking, and we don't have to.

Jehovah is an American grandfather, angular and hard,

The smile for infants on his knee coming hard like sunlight through a cracked marble slab.

And when he dies, see how hard he has to try to reach out a hand to the grandkids, oxygen tent notwithstanding,

Who an embarrassed stranger would stand all around in duty,

Wondering whether the old man will finally kick off this time or not.

The American martyr woman, the wife until she dies,

Turned into a widow, turned into a neuter sagging figure, employee with no boss.

Watch Isabelle rock and rock in rows of chairs in an old age home.

See the awful knowledge in her face after brief princess fame, motherhood, her superannuated posture.

See the lucky ladies out side with husbands still alive, something to serve forever,

And grandkids to creep onto buses for and go shop for Christmas.

A poem to the gun or the man behind it,

A simple thing really, back pocket, closet shelf, dresser drawer.

The first cold iron casually laid out on the counter feels like ice on the spine.

Life is so tenuous, so small, such a warm, liquid, fragile creature.

This thing has no mystery, we all know what it's for.

Feel your own limbs, cold and ugly in a puddle on the floor.

But what can be changed?

Human rage has got to have its finger.

Let us be honest with ourselves.

Let us not mince words or decorate them with 1,000 different curlicues.

Let's try for once to recreate simply one dimension, no more, no less than what happened.

At the same time, let us realize that no one simple thing has occurred in the history of birds, fishes, [INAUDIBLE] whales, and pelicans,

So much less than with you and me who contain more animals than you'd guess at.

This poem comes from an image of the African custom of wailing for the dead. It's called "Death Woman Wail"

The wail in the night, lovers lying, parched mouths barely touching

The cry rising, rolling, grieving, a mind mad in sleep for each empty day torn away

The death woman wail the loss, the husband dead, the corpse in the bed

The heart attack, the broken heart, the unbelieving protesting call,

The wail rolling out in the quiet hour

Dainty girl in your lover's arms, do you block out the noise?

Can you forget the wail in the dark, pretend he'll never leave you?

She carries him a flower, wilting every day,

Her feet slide and stumble, no place of safety to place it

She carries him a fetus, more delicate than a flower

He is in her body too ingrown to touch

She rides him a chariot, she is borne away

She is dying every day

He decides directions blindly in the night

They breathe soft in each other's faces,

Catching up wrists for the pole speed, marveling at the beat of the blood,

Terrified it will fail them, and chariot and flower all fall down

A couple of new things. This is a fragment.

Children, silent, unsocked feet, walk in and out,

While their parents smoke dope in the kitchen.

See their small faces, transparent, moving like water over stone?

This is how it goes, the throes of passion.

Has anybody told you how to handle it? No.

Slips of sentences, sly, mocking, irreverent slide in between the sobs.

How can your own mind do this to you?

Isn't grief sacred anymore?

Do you really care? No.

Visions of oceans, salt, bitter, cold, rolling over the sunlit beaches.

This is stately enough, but then what is drowned?

Turtles' eggs, bits of sloppy shells, and a little seaweed.

No wonder you giggle then laugh, raucous as a sea bird slicing through foam.

This is sort of a personal history of a friend, but there's a lot in it I think that means something to other people, too.

Wandering blindly, grief-stricken through one another's lives,

They are children in manner only.

He bluntly asks her forgiveness for dying like this.

She has no answer to the question that haunts her.

What is there beyond these days, these brave smiles, these questions?

What of it? He is her father, no lover has touched her like this.

No friends death has pulled her down to the dark vortex of madness.

She is helpless. She does not direct this stage, these actors.

She rebels at being found in the audience.

Can you see, she is stunned by it?

The realization that some things change permanently.

Her lover lives in her old house with his new wife and does not ask her to bed with him, and never will again.

And the two steady poles, the gentle, the stark that are her parents, wither, fall apart before her eyes.

MARY PAT FLANDRICK: My name is Mary Pat Flandrick, and I live and make poems sometimes. This first poem is entitled "The Catholic Poem." And it's for my mother and my sister Frou, who's nine. It's sort of a revenge poem and doesn't need any explanation.

We watch her so that it does not happen to her, though she is me at five,

Knowing how to take buses, city to city, knowing the fire color of her own eyes,

Knowing the feel of her good body, feet to concrete, hand to your breast, hand to her vagina

Yellow hair, a fountain, sweeping the ground when head cold tossed while swinging,

Fills with Greek and red wonderland blue Egypt and loves every body,

Until the nun teaches her how to read by crucifixion,

Until the nun teaches piano with a ruler,

Until the nun teaches sexual pity with the knife wounds in Saint Maria Goretti.

And she learned to bow her head for Jesus.

And she learned to bow her head to the God at home.

And she learns to kill the goddess of herself.

The second poem is dedicated to Freud, and it was written in response to a question that my marriage, sex, and the family teacher asked. Have any of you ever known a little girl or a woman who wished that she had a penis? And the whole class was sort of taken aback, and we had to think about it for a while. And I was the only one who came up with anything. So this is called "The Only Known Case of Penis Envy."

Lying with the chicken picnic, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, above the city of Nice,

Lying and needing to go to the bathroom, none around,

Squatting in the bushes overlooking the Mediterranean Sea above the city of Nice

This third one is entitled the "Car Crash Poem," and it's in three parts, three people's ways of looking at this experience. And I'll pause between each part.

Cousin Skip taught me to ride horse, my first time flying,

Built the labyrinth of straw in the hayloft through the dead bat,

And under the cover is me.

Gave me cabbage white, pink-eyed rabbit,

Stared at 13-year-old me to say, surprised, "You've gotten pretty."

Skip, thick black eyebrows across your forehead, not seen for three years.

Father, our Flandrick and son on the mailbox,

Skip, first son of Richard, son of Harold, son of Eugene.

I walked past you in the hospital.

Are you a machine? Sterile, coma, tubes, dialysis, oxygen, saline.

I walk in the hospital calling, "Lazarus, Lazarus," but is he a machine?

I ask, "God's will be done," as I grind my fork into the salad bowl,

Twisting it into, "God's will be done."

My fork in my fist, I will kill death in the salad bowl,

With my fist, not my fist, Richard not Richard, but sunless.

Is he a machine? Who would break a salad bowl to be his son,

To fly into his heart, to hold him, to fall into the grave he is?

Mother, how it was 26 years ago to create fire for the first time

How it was to finally have pain mean something

How it is to look at you and feel my heart and head and ovaries and blood

My body singing, "You are from me, through me"

How we were wombmates, we lived in each other

I took you with me everywhere

How you were a miracle but not a mystery

A surprise but not a secret

How I do not own you, but you are mine

How I love you twice, once for you and once for me

How today you are a car accident

It is my bones too smashed, my blood gone

It is my life in critical condition, in shock

I go through the motions, but I am not walking away from you

I'm going to do a poem that is about a man, but it's an experience that happens a lot to women who go through, quote, "psychotic episodes," unquote. And the usual method of dealing with this is to have the psychiatrist play father or parent and to punish the errant child with an electric spanking, otherwise known as shock therapy. And this poem is entitled "Dick." And is dedicated to the Freudian mafia.

We were talking at work about our favorite foods.

You said green peppers, and I brought you one,

The biggest greenest I've ever found.

But they put you on shock treatments.

And after the first one, you forgot that you liked green peppers

This is my grandfather poem. It's entitled "The Grave of Your Heart Was Full." And I've read it in public, I think, twice. The first time was shortly after I wrote it. We have a ritual in our family of going to the cemetery on Veterans Day and Memorial Day. And I wanted to read this instead of saying a prayer and asked my father if that would be all right. And he said, go ahead. And I read it, and as I read it, it began to rain and thunder. "The Grave of Your Heart Was Full."

At nine, I learned from my grandfather's kind man, candy man, peanut man, death I wept for myself,

Because a hole in the ground opened up for him.

Though on thunder afternoons, nights, through my terror, mother's words,

"Your grandfather is just bowling in heaven.

Each applause of thunder means he's made another strike."

And so my grandfather lives on in the weather, I know this is true.

On the day he died, maybe the exact.

I was digging in the garden where my rabbit was buried and unearthed a silver and sapphire ring.

It was from them, I know this is true.

OK.

JANELLE HONGOS: (SINGING) I am all your man, and now it makes me grow

No more sorrow, no more yield

It's time to sing aloha

It's time for all our sisters to take each other's hands

Together we will dare to go freed on land

Brothers, you are human too

How come you don't me?

Times I waited all alone, I think I knew someday soon

I have waited long enough, and now it's plain to see

You will never know me until my sisters all are free

No, I'm not waiting anymore of all promises and smiles

Your promises are all in vain, your smile is my only always

Together we can make a life for women and for men

Where children dare to be themselves and all do want they can

That's why they're all women, and now it makes me hope

No more sorrow, no more yield

It's time to sing aloha

It's time for all our sisters to take each other's hands

Together we will dare to go freed on land

SPEAKER: The four poets who have just read their poetry in the order they read were Bea Williams, Penny [? Cees, ?] Mary Ellen Shaw, and Mary Pat Flandrick. The singer was Janelle Hongos. They will all be appearing on a program tomorrow night for the Minnesota Women's Political Caucus at a membership social gathering at the home of Aviva Breen. 5111 Aldrich Avenue South in Minneapolis at 8 o'clock.

This is in celebration of Susan B. Anthony's birthday and is open to non-- or to interested non-members as well as members, male as well as female. There is a charge of $2 for those who are not members and $1 for members. Everyone is welcome.

JANELLE HONGOS: (SINGING) You are the one who've got to be strong

You've had 13 children and [INAUDIBLE]

When was our baby born on the journey west

On the way you laid him to rest

You are the one who've got to be strong

Farm 80 acres and the [INAUDIBLE]

On the open prairie I thought I saw a home

Winters are long, oh, winters are cold

Your husband died and he left you all alone

Eight children to raise in your [INAUDIBLE]

Your nearest neighbor is five miles away

Horses gone lame with your eldest in vain

You are one with no time to cry

You got to live so your children survive

You're over falling now, not much time to go

And your hair has turned white as a snow

Hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm

I was born on the wild open prairie

Golden brown wheat like a sea

And waves and wind with a soft, gentle sound

Like a rustling of leaves in a tree

My forefathers peacefully live on the land

Waiting for grain from the earth

Their tools were their hands and their love on the soil

All brought from gladness of their worth

Can I ever go back to North Dakota?

Can I ever go back, back to home?

From the east came the man who would steal our grain

Hauling our harvest away

They're the rich and powerful men from the [INAUDIBLE]

Mocking us by prices they pay

Can I ever go back to North Dakota?

Can I ever go back, back to my home?