ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author is a courageous witness to violence and atrocity. She is willing to face the horrors and to find in her soul a way to write and bring it to others in poetic form. Her poem "Violation" captures the sense of violence and the courage. The author's use of language unveils the ravages of rape. She presents her poem with comments about her desire and determination to write this poem. The anthology in which the poem appears is Veils, Halos & Shackles. She is Professor Emerita in the Department of Literature at American University in Washington, DC and former president of Yaddo Artist's Community. Her writing shows her special capacity to be a witness to individual experience of trauma: she listens, she waits, she creates. Her interviews in Lithuania have led to her new book: A Survivor Named Trauma: Holocaust and the Construction of Memory.
