A Circle of Grace

Befitting her role as Philadelphia’s Poet Laureate, Trapeta Mayson, M.S.S. ’95, who delivered the Commencement address for Bryn Mawr’s 2021 graduate degree recipients on May 28, bookended her speech with healing verse.

A native of Liberia, Mayson has received grants and fellowships from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Leeway Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Aspen Institute, among others.

In her Commencement speech, Mayson spoke of the grace and kindness she and her sister received as social work graduate students in the mid ’90s, and the grace offered by then-admissions director Nancy Kirby, who “looked at me and my sister and … didn’t see us as needy Black girls from a poor neighborhood with an ill mother,” but as “two smart young women who would add value to this College.”

Mayson, who received an M.S.S. from GSSWSR, also talked about the need to be “deeply human” when encountering those with no interest in receiving or offering grace. “You will have to be a model for those who can’t see through to the path of human kindness,” she said. “Will you accept the charge?”

Mayson offered her own “bit of grace” to the graduates in the form of two poems, including “in this season,” an affirming poem that launched the Healing Verse Philly Poetry Line, a toll-free telephone line (1-855-763-6792) that offers callers a 90-second poem by a Philadelphia-connected poet.

in this season

in this season of naming and of holding space
for the quieted and the muted to be amplified
in this season of shifting, of barrier breaking
undoing/unearthing/uprising/leveling
you beloved, may think yourself too small
may think your intentions and acts too slight
may think you are but a fragment, a mere atom
in this place of stars and gazers

but what a world you are
what a sphere of shocking beauty and grace
do you not see how
your one song one breath one step one voice
your one pause one lift one shout one protest
brought us here, keeps us here?

you say that it’s only a speck you offer,
just a tiny bit, a smidge, a morsel
but do you not see the feast ahead it prepares—
how even the remains have purpose?
how it beckons all to your grand table?
how it feeds and fills and expands?

friend, you are a balm in these prickly times
you are a vessel, a refuge, a respite