“coming to the end of spring / my grandmother kicks off her shoes / steps out of her faltering body.”

Who says there’s just one safe way to walk, one road properly lit, and the rest – all slippery water, unmarked?

If our dreams could edit the news (and sometimes our nightmares) these poems are how they’d wake us up to the urgency of our times.

I was brought up by two women: my mother and my grandmother.

I grew up in a very British family who had been transplanted to Canada, and my grandmother’s house was filled with English books.

I was an early reader, and my grandmother, who as a child had been forbidden to read by a father who believed books.

My grandmother flew only once in her life, and that was the day she and her new husband ascended into the skies of Victorian London in the wicker basket of a hot-air balloon.

Why don’t we focus on what Afghan women can do? They can cook, bear children, and pray. As I recall, that was fine for our grandmothers.

I am indebted to [my grandmothers] always for cradling me in the heart of Christ and encouraging my passion to press towards the mark of the high calling on my life, wherever that takes me.

I had praying grandmothers who bathed me in “The Word” and filled the atmosphere with worship.

We lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo’s Women’s War.