Around This Table / Here It All Began

In commemoration of PCADVs 25th anniversary as the nations first state domestic violence coalition, our Board of Directors commissioned an original poem and oil painting in tribute to our first and only Executive Director Susan Kelly-Dreiss, as well as the Coalitions founding members and statewide network of domestic violence programs.

Around This Table is an original poem by Dora E. McQuaid survivor, poet, performer, activist and teacher from State College, PA that honors the pioneering spirit of advocates working to end domestic violence in Pennsylvania.

Here it all began is an original oil painting by Anne-Marie Ruggeri an artist from the French village of Bonnieux in Provence that creates an impressionistic study of Susan Kelly-Dreiss kitchen table. In l976, Susan and a handful of women gathered around this very table with a vision of reaching out to battered women and their children living in fear in every corner of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Full color 24 by 36 posters can be purchased through PCADVs Resource Catalog.

Around this Table
Here it all Began

Around this table, I learned that hope is communal.
Hands joined to sisters hands,
hope became the light that lit this long way
after one woman, one witness-survivor,
raised her own hand, fingering possibility in the air
above us, that became the call.
We came from every corner and county,
every age, color and creed
to this table, to join hands and histories,
to join our own good fights for the basics long denied,
against the despair that rocked us,
as we rocked another woman near to broken,
as we got on our knees to hold her as she cried,
her head bent to that hand of forgiveness not one of us
can offer but only to ourselves.

Around this table, we told the stories we took home with us,
or the ones our own homes, sometimes, offered.
We told the stories when the burden needed voices
and open hands, until the voices raised together.
We learned from the soul out
how to gather the feet of those women
beneath their bodies near to broken again,
to help them lift themselves up gracefully
when grace was the last thing any one of us felt
in this taking of sides.
We learned how to teach each woman how to stand again
and in the teaching, we learned how to stand
for them, with them, across from them,
each woman a mirror image,
with the voices of our mothers or fathers, children
or lovers, sisters or brothers whispering or clanging in our heads
Mercy, or
There but for the grace go I, or Went I,
before learning this standing;
across from this woman or the one who will follow,
or her daughter, bearing mirror image, that says
when nearly nothing else has the power or defiance
to say, Yes, you can do this. We can do this.
We can do this reckoning together and we can face
the freedom together, until you can face it alone.
Or choose to join the rest of us, here,
around this table, learning and aching,
forging the way so that others might find it,
joining this voice that became the confrontation of an epidemic,
wedded to the demand to be heard, to be counted, to be considered...
because these were lives we were fighting for,
are still fighting for,
putting hand to work with whatever tools we could claim or unearth,
making the tools we needed as we went along to confront
a society breeding the eye veiled to brutality,
based on public inaction in the homes of "private" terror.

Join us here, after you have learned, as we have learned,
to trust your feet to hold you, and know
that you can bend yourself, gently, to sit with us,
in this circle, link a hand with one of us, or maybe two

because we have learned along this way, this endless path of 25 years,
advocating compassion and adamance, outrage and action, that
the linked hand is the one that will not be broken;
one hand joining another is the beginning of a chain;
two women feed strength together where one has crouched alone;
three women raise a voice communal, political, graceful
that can be heard above the din of silence;
four women, linking around a table like this one choose
to change the world, one woman at a time,
five women cast a spell of strength over their formation
stronger than any one of them alone;
six women are a circle, backs to each other, hands
barring entrance from without and bearing protection within
of whomever has need for their circles sheltered center.

Join us here, at this table.
Rest your arms, loosely, over coffee mugs and legal pads.
Weve all got an eye to the children and the future.
Settle yourself into this sisterhood as we discover that seven women,
and growing, reaching across one womans kitchen,
across a county, a state, a country, are a force, undeniable.
We have lit the way with our spirits
stretching out.
We have bent ourselves into these chairs
to learn how to stand and how to shine, for each other,
radiating light
from open hands, empowered and clasping,
and voices raising together,
claiming community,
claiming revolution.

2001 Dora E. McQuaid