Woman Teaching Woman

Woman Teaching Woman

No fanfare.

No podium.

No credential worn on the outside.

Just one woman

pulling a chair close to another

and saying, 

here, let me show you.

This is how knowledge has always moved

among women,

not from stage to audience,

not from high to low,

but sideways,

shoulder to shoulder,

hand guiding hand

toward the thing

the other hand

is learning to do.

She teaches and creates simultaneously.

Not despite the teaching ,

through it.

Because a woman who knows

does not empty herself

in the giving.

She fills.

The stars she wears

are not for anyone in the room.

They are a reminder

she dressed herself with

in the morning 

you have navigated by harder skies than this.

The blue she chose

is the colour of a woman

who has stopped asking

whether the room is ready for her.

This is intelligence

without armour.

Calm without distance.

Strength without the performance of it.

A woman

who learned

so that another woman

could learn 

and made something beautiful

in the space between

one lesson

and the next.

This is the oldest curriculum.

No classroom was built for it.

No certificate is issued.

But every woman who has ever been taught by another woman

knows exactly what it costs

and exactly what it gives.