Individual freedoms—basic freedoms of speech, press, assembly, religion—are still not fully recognized as inalienable rights in much of our world today. In one country a woman, like many of her fellow citizens, was sent to prison as a dissident. She was confined for three and a half years, and the adversity she faced must certainly have been great, beyond what most of us could possibly know. Yet her spirit was not broken. Courage would not be crushed.
This woman was a poet. And, without pen or paper she nevertheless managed to continue composing her poetry during those hard years of imprisonment. Later she recalled the way that many of her poems were written: "I used what was left of a burned matchstick and wrote on a bar of soap in my cell. I would read it and read it until it was committed to memory. Then with one washing of my hands it would be gone." Quoted in Newsweek, December 29, 1986, p. 15 .
But of course the poems were not really gone. They would always be hers—"committed to memory." And when she was set free, others would learn of this poetry of courage that could not be silenced by the walls of a prison. The woman miraculously completed some two hundred and fifty poems—many of them with only a matchstick and a bar of soap.
