Liz Berry illuminates Women of Balsall Heath
This year marks an incredible, historic milestone for Anawim, an organization that has served as a sanctuary, a lifeline, and a beacon of hope for women in Balsall Heath, is celebrating its 40th anniversary.
Anawim is a Hebrew word from the Old Testament meaning ‘poor ones’ who remained faithful to God in times of difficulty or the ‘faithful remnant’, Anawim lift women up, offer them tools for recovery, and wrap them in a supportive community.
Anawim Birthday celebrations marks the beginning of Balsall Heath Community Festival 3rd to 13th July.
A Poetic Tribute
Liz Berry captures the spirit of Anawim’s mission, honouring the unsung, resilient women of Balsall Heath and Birmingham:
Psalm (after Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Psalm III’)
Illuminate all women. Beginning with Balsall Heath, at dawn.
With the ghost of Sister Maisie bringing tea to the sex workers;
with the women in red aprons laying out jigsaws in the nursery;
the cleaners coming home from Corporation Street on the 50,
eyes flickering shut in the heater’s warmth.
Illuminate the nurses leaving for the early shift, windscreen wipers on,
radio crooning; the mothers cutting toast into triangles,
stepping toddlers from their wet pyjamas; the girl making love,
eyes closed, still half-asleep, feeling water rise through her
like the cut being thawed. Illuminate the insomniacs
in their kitchens in the fading dark, night nearly behind them;
the college girls and their sisters, asleep in shared box rooms,
phones in hand, always waiting for his message. Inshallah.
The woman who begs for money at the Middleway junction,
scabs on her wrists and round her mouth like poppies;
the one who dozes in a tent in the bushes, the one so thin
with a little star tattooed on her cheek and her eyebrows painted black.
Illuminate the women praying; the women doing yoga
foreheads to the floor in child’s pose; the old women who lie stiff
with arthritis, remembering, as girls, how frost furred
the inside of the windows, wondering how early they can ring their daughters;
daughters boiling kettles and stripping bedsheets,
turning on the radio to Kath, in her windowless studio:
“Good morning, Birmingham, I’m with you all the way until 6 …”
Illuminate them all. Let the buried Rea be a blast of light.
LIZ BERRY
Liz Berry’s collections of poems include Black Country, 2014, The Republic of Motherhood, 2018, and The Home Child, 2023.