What Mending Can Mean
One of Conchita’s own backstrap-loomed tapetes
for Maria Concepción Venja Sarabia
In a triage ward of twenty beds
in a giant public hospital
voices groaning and wailing for care,
fluorescent light beating down like cold fire
in that place of never resting,
in that room of not enough
interns buzzing about importantly
but never coming to her side –
she was standing up in the bed.
The bandage around her head was bloody.
At eighty-nine, it was her first time
in a hospital, stripped of her clothes,
wrangled like meat into a faded gown.
She was standing up in the bed
like an upright tree in a flattened forest.
The only thing with living spirit
in that hellish room of moaning prone.
She had to go to the bathroom.
The railings were locked on high,
she had to go, she was standing up,
in her Triqui language yelling to get out.
In a battlefield of flattened grass
she was standing like flower flaming.
She was my friend. I see her still
bleeding through her bandage,
a great wolf-woman straining in a trap.
That’s when they made me leave.
Family was to wait outside the triage ward.
I’d bluffed my way in as translator
though I spoke few words pf Triqui,
but suddenly they had enough staff
for two young men to escort me out.
Her howling resistance pierced the waiting room.
Two years past and still it rings in my ears.
Still I see Conchita rising
in that hospital chaos of twenty beds.
Though she survived
both attack and the trauma of hospital healing,
that sound still stays, a sword in my heart.
My heart has hidden away until today
what happened after that.
They let me come back in
to tell her she was about to be moved
to another ward in the hospital.
Conchita was tied to the railings.
By wrists and ankles, tied down to the railings.
I gazed on my friend like that,
my rage and hers restrained like that.
No wonder two years had to pass
before I could remember what I had to see,
my fiery friend tied down to the bed.
Still today I can barely bear the memory.
In the village where both of us lived,
two drunk young thugs leaving the nearby bar
had beaten her in the night
for the coins that people gave her during the day.
In her makeshift sleeping place,
with the stick she lifted to defend herself,
they bashed her head into cranial fractures.
Her Mayan constitution let her live, but now
she’s confined to a nursing home for indigents
far from the those she greeted daily on the street.
She’s healed and fed and has a bed,
but they took away her indigenous clothes.
Sometimes I wonder, when I visit, who this woman is.
Indomitable, my son has called Conchita.
She continues to confound our meager expectations.
I watch my friend in admiration and respect
as she keeps on meeting her life, changing her face.
She teaches me something I cannot name.
Her resilience and strength as impenetrable
as a densely-jungled rain forest
in her Oaxaca birthplace; her diversity abundant,
her ecosystem one of a kind.
I witnessed only one of her traumas,
but I have seen how she salvages Self
like a flower returning to rise again.
Conchta has shown me what mending can mean.
©Susa Silvermarie 2026 
So heartfelt. Thank you, Susa
Poignant. Intense. Deeply honoring your dear friend. Thank you for introducing her to me with your passionate language.
What a lovely way to say to her (and to us) “I see you.” You honor her with your words and we share with you this delight in knowing her, and the gift of learning from her.
Mending indeed.
That is a tender testimonial to a local heroine. I miss greeting her on my walks, adding to her coin purse, or handing her a treat. More, I miss the smile she returned to me from her seat on the curb. While I am happy that she is safe, clean, and comfortable, my heart grieves for her many losses. That grief is seeded in an expanding field of accumulating losses that I water with tears.
I remember when you started writing about Conchita when she was still hanging her wares on a clothesline, still working her craft. I love the more recent ( I think) photos. How you honor her. What I also appreciate here is the craft, how you tell this story in a poem because want o tell the story of each of my grandmothers, or both together, in poem form instead of prose. So I’ve put this before me as exampleinspiration and if I get somewhere with my poem (s), I promise to send it to you. Just love, jennie
How heartbreaking, this trauma, for Conchita and for you. Painful to read, yet so important to breathe thru this thick airless inhumanity you describe. I remember her well…old and strong, sitting on the ground weaving…and your strong & tender communion. You were familial. 💞💖💞 Dearhearts, both.
Bless you both 🙌🙏🙌
I so appreciate your poignant offering!