NVN Friday… WOMEN’S HISTORY 2025: SAY HER NAME

Mar 07, 2025

Cross-posted by The New Verse Newsletter

"Honoring my grandmother’s memory this Women’s History Month Ancestral Women 31-Day Challenge DAY 5 Her name is Sophie Silverstein (1874-1964). Daughter. Mother. Grandmother. Immigrant. Eshet Hayil: a woman of valor. This Women’s History Month, I am revealing the fragments of my Ukrainian-Jewish immigrant grandmother’s life as told to me, each day through Notes. Honored, on Day 6, for this tribute to appear on New Verse News. I will also compile the notes from the first 7 days of March in today's posting share the bigger picture. "

- Robin Payes

by Robin Stevens Payes

my country is busy writing out history

1. women
2. immigrants
3. ukraine

so I must write them in

grandma sophie checks

these boxes

~~one~~

~~two~~

~~three~~

she left the shtetl in 1893

for the american dream

she fled

1. pogroms
2. despots
3. poverty

she arrived by

1. horse and wagon
2. train
3. ship

violently assaulted

violated

a #metoo moment

before we could speak

such things aloud

my grandmother kept

her life lost a life

silenced

in pursuit of

1. love
2. safety
3. family

silenced by shame she

never spoke her trauma

but passed it down

on top of the genes

episilencing generations

1. ancestors
2. descendants
3. ascendance

through no fault of her own

and now her landsman

this democratically elected

leader of a free country

symbolized by the sunflower

source of seeds and oil

hearth and home like sophie

symbols of peace and resilience

comes to defend freedom

and dignity for all

not to grovel

at the tsar’s feet

violently assaulted

violated

an #ustoo moment

we must speak aloud

I call out the horror

sophie’s story is america’s story

truth trauma triumph and all

i am writing herstory

1. SOPHIE her name
2. PROUD her legacy
3. AMERICA her goldene medina

episilenced #nomore

Robin Stevens Payes is a time traveler who reasons that time and space are just inconvenient rules that other people decided the world must follow. After decades of trying to fit some notion of “normal” she chose to dive deeper into the offbeat, allowing verse to fill a poetic void. Her poetry has appeared in several anthologies: Dawn Horizons, East Sea Bards, Maryland Bards Poetry Reviews, and Reflections. She is time traveling to retrieve fragments of her grandmother Sophie’s story in [re]member the world, weaving together poetry, memoir, history and science. She writes about the process of weaving memory into a tapestry on her Substack