Ruth Garnes
Ruth Andrews Garnes is a creative poetic and lyric writer of the Human experience.
She started writing and journaling as a way to cope with life’s challenges.
Today with songs such as “Go Girl Go, Bring It On, and Powerful,” Ruth empowers listeners, and reminds them of their Potentials, “win the world over and don’t forget you’re powerful.”
Listen to her songs and read accounts of her life in her poetry and stories found here on this site or in her books listed below.
Featured Books
The Cry of Our Children
This book is a series of poems of love and perseverance in the face of struggles. It promotes love as the answer to social issues and is based on the writer's experiences. She believes that the way we love affects every aspect of our life including our community.
Fantasy or My Reality
A series of poems of love, courage, commitment and endearment dedicated to hurting children everywhere.
Songs By Ruth
The Cry of our Children: Poems by Ruth Andrews Garnes
When I reflect back, it is as if a single conversation triggered my life’s journey, the twists and turns it took brought me to this exact moment.
In the late eighties I worked as a nurse at Bellevue Hospital Center. One day, when I was the triage nurse, a rather handsome looking fellow came in. I still remember that he was in great physical shape and did not appear to be someone who needed attention in the Emergency Room. Being a nurse, facing death was not a new experience. However, the tragedy of it never gets old. As this handsome fellow conversed with me, I learn that he had just been released from prison. While he was in prison, he was diagnosed with the AIDS virus.
I think I saw the fear of death in his desperate eyes. Perhaps, it was that fear that brought him straight to the Emergency Room upon his release from prison. I put down my pen. I tried my utmost best to gather myself and to convey some encouraging words to diffuse the heaviness surrounding us. I felt it necessary to lift him up out of his despair and to give him a message of hope. With that I told him that, he could make something of his life, as long as he was alive and not to let this malady define his entire life. His response immediately halted the conversation, and he withdrew from it; his final remark shook me. He said that it was easy for me to sit on my chair and say all those things. Read More
He saw in me a person, untouched. Protected and shielded by the chair I get to sit on every day, “My place in life.” If there was ever a time and there is truly not one, to feel ashamed of being protected, in that moment, I was. I was deeply ashamed and saddened at the same time.
My experiences are not everyone’s but at this point in my life, I can say with certainty, that I am no longer untouched. As I battled my own malady, for the last few years, I realized that those words I spoke that day, have carried me through and they still stand true for me: “for as long as we have breath and a will, we can achieve or accomplish our dreams”. I had decided that, if I were to be remembered I wanted to be remembered for my creative writings. In the midst of my own illness I still believed as I said to that man.
“The Cry of Our Children”, is a collection of poems crafted as I battled and faced desperate trials. I refused to accept illness, abandonment, indifference or grief as the writer of my destiny; instead I channeled every horrifying event and crafted beautiful poems and lyrics. They’re not only of my own struggles, but of universal subjects like love, hope and triumph. Some poems are of the struggles that I have seen and are of other people; pain inflicted at times by others, people degrading and misusing people. I recognized that huge change could result from healthy involvements. In the depths of my own despair, I have learned to see other people’s pain and my own, more potently. I have written them as poems in a manner that will give my readers a glimpse of the myriad of experiences of my life.
All in all, “The Cry of Our children,” might have been lessons meant for me born of a single conversation. My true experiences and responses as I struggled with illness brought back a memory and authenticated my spoken words. I was guided by that conviction and hope, in the face of my own tragedies.
Below is a poem that I crafted in the face of the tragic and unexpected loss of my brother Paul Andrews. I call it, “Living with the Angels”.
As children we used to run and play.
Remained close until that tragic day.
What I was told didn’t make sense.
They claimed that you killed yourself.
Our loss is heaven’s gain.
Now you’re living with angels.
Free from your troubles and pain.
Like we were when we were children.
I remembered when you were two.
You thought blinking lights laughed with you.
Then, you laughed back with them.
And laughed at the stories you’d tell.
Our loss is heaven’s gain.
Now you’re living with angels.
Free from your troubles and pain.
Like we were when we were children.
In the military you sky dived.
Had an aneurysm and survived.
So why did you take your life?
But this is what I tell myself.
Our loss is heaven’s gain.
Now you’re living with angels.
Free from your troubles and pain.
Like we were when we were children.
