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(Barbara Fant, Erma Poet Laureate, wrote and performed this beautiful poem at the 2024 Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop. Like Erma, she dared to say "yes" — and inspired every writer in the room. Listen here.)

For Erma: when the real writers come back home

when the real writers come home
there will be a sound, a rhythm in the belly of tomorrow
an anchoring that calls those who believe back into themselves
there will be the words
those scribbled on notebook paper, the faded journals shaped
like autumn leaves, black and white newspaper print
etched in the back of someone’s bedroom closet,
or dining room table
Erma, the morning coffee and the afternoon
the season after season, even
when everyone was at their wit’s end
you were always the beginning
a new day arising or phrase,
or way to look at something ordinary in the most extraordinary
or unorthodox kind of ways

when the real writers come back,
remind them that the wives are always on time and in place,
perfection in all their imperfections,
that even though halos shall never hang above the crown
of husbands or these children being raised, that with mom’s help,
they still have a chance at touching heaven
that if you can’t make it better, you can still laugh at it, and
we will laugh at ourselves,
mirror of our own eyes staring back at us,
how you forced us to look us in reflection
and find humor in our every ounce of human,
you reminded us of our human,
that even when life is a bowl of cherries and we find
ourselves in the pits, that there is still the stem,
and the blossom, and the tomorrow,
that we get to walk into

when the real writers come back,
tell them to thank God for mothers,
for all the ways we have been nourished and nurtured
back into ourselves, back into our own skin,
to tell the stories blooming in our bosom,
your words strung up on refrigerator doors like Christmas lights
in the night sky, a star permeating our every darkness,
our dreams perched like a new sun,
how dreams have only one owner at a time,

and when the real writers come alive
let the hallelujah stand from the back pew,
raise the glasses to all the stories that have fallen from shoulders,
how the grass is not always greener over the septic tank, but
it might be greener when we choose to empty ourselves on a page,
tell our truths as loud as a new morning breaking,
how a lineage of writers birthed from your throat
from your “yes”

a journey of women wading through their own tests, trials, homes,
cooked meals and laundry loads,
soccer practice and midnight essay papers,
Erma, you made people believe,
have hope in the fact that they could write their own narratives,
laugh at their lives,
laugh at themselves,
and find home in the places that we find home in each other,

this is for every brother, sister, believer, dreamer,
healer, listener, humorist, writer,
who dared to say “yes,”
sing out loud until the only hymn that sways sings
“when we stand before God at the end of our lives,
let us not have a single bit of talent left,
let us use everything God gave us,”
let our bodies testify that we poured it all out,
until there was nothing left,
that like you, Erma,
we ran our race,
we opened ourselves up,
we wrote until we could truly see ourselves,
we did our very best

By Barbara Fant

Written and performed by Barbara Fant for the 2024 Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop