111 Gender and feminism poems

Yes, injured Woman! rise, assert thy right! Woman! too long degraded, scorned, opprest; O born to rule in partial Law's despite, Resume thy native empire o'er the breast! Go forth arrayed in panoply divine; That angel pureness which admits no stain; Go, bid proud Man his boasted rule resign, And kiss the golden sceptre of thy reign. Go, gird thyself with grace; collect thy store Of bright artillery glancing from afar; Soft melting tones thy thundering cannon's roar, Blushes and fears thy magazine of war. Thy rights are empire: urge no meaner claim,— Felt, not defined, and if debated, lost; Like sacred mysteries, which withheld from fame, Shunning discussion, are revered the most. Try all that wit and art suggest to bend Of thy imperial foe the stubborn knee; Make treacherous Man thy subject, not thy friend; Thou mayst command, but never canst be free. Awe the licentious, and restrain the rude; Soften the sullen, clear the cloudy brow: Be, more than princes' gifts, thy favours sued;— She hazards all, who will the least allow. But hope not, courted idol of mankind, On this proud eminence secure to stay; Subduing and subdued, thou soon shalt find Thy coldness soften, and thy pride give way. Then, then, abandon each ambitious thought, Conquest or rule thy heart shall feebly move, In Nature's school, by her soft maxims taught, That separate rights are lost in mutual love.

i.m. India's missing girls This is not really myth or secret. This murmur in the mouth of the mountain where the sound of rain is born. This surging past pilgrim town and village well. This coin-thin vagina and acid stain of bone. This doctor with his rusty tools, this street cleaner, this mother laying down the bloody offerings of birth. This is not the cry of a beginning, or a river buried in the bowels of the earth. This is the sound of ten million girls singing of a time in the universe when they were born with tigers breathing between their thighs; when they set out for battle with all three eyes on fire, their golden breasts held high like weapons to the sky.

Maud went to college. Sadie stayed at home. Sadie scraped life With a fine-tooth comb. She didn’t leave a tangle in. Her comb found every strand. Sadie was one of the livingest chits In all the land. Sadie bore two babies Under her maiden name. Maud and Ma and Papa Nearly died of shame. When Sadie said her last so-long Her girls struck out from home. (Sadie had left as heritage Her fine-tooth comb.) Maud, who went to college, Is a thin brown mouse. She is living all alone In this old house.

Her sister was shot, and hers found bludgeoned dead in her car trunk;her mother was alcoholic, and hers a suicide;her daughter killed by an uncle, and hers stayed alive thanks to prison. Before the term,date-raped, she was. Before domestic violence, love punched her face. We wanted the career. Not just skills and money, but structure, focus, printed plans, the rowdy order of raising buildings that years later would still stand right where you left them. We joined a tradition, expected a well-marked path and a welcome. The earnest ads never mentioned we’d be human minesweepers steering around barricades, sinkholes, lethal instructions, We learned Solidarity was a corporation privately held. Some left in shock. Some were maimed. Some went missing. A few found gold. Those with talent for sifting real threat from bluff, or detecting hair-triggers before the blast, fared best, We taught ourselves to disarm booby traps, shared hand-drawn maps, and prepared for a long winter. We lied on postcards home.

Even tonight and I need to take a walk and clear my head about this poem about why I can’t go out without changing my clothes my shoes my body posture my gender identity my age my status as a woman alone in the evening/ alone on the streets/alone not being the point/ the point being that I can’t do what I want to do with my own body because I am the wrong sex the wrong age the wrong skin and suppose it was not here in the city but down on the beach/ or far into the woods and I wanted to go there by myself thinking about God/or thinking about children or thinking about the world/all of it disclosed by the stars and the silence: I could not go and I could not think and I could not stay there alone as I need to be alone because I can’t do what I want to do with my own body and who in the hell set things up like this and in France they say if the guy penetrates but does not ejaculate then he did not rape me and if after stabbing him if after screams if after begging the bastard and if even after smashing a hammer to his head if even after that if he and his buddies fuck me after that then I consented and there was no rape because finally you understand finally they fucked me over because I was wrong I was wrong again to be me being me where I was/wrong to be who I am which is exactly like South Africa penetrating into Namibia penetrating into Angola and does that mean I mean how do you know if Pretoria ejaculates what will the evidence look like the proof of the monster jackboot ejaculation on Blackland and if after Namibia and if after Angola and if after Zimbabwe and if after all of my kinsmen and women resist even to self-immolation of the villages and if after that we lose nevertheless what will the big boys say will they claim my consent: Do You Follow Me: We are the wrong people of the wrong skin on the wrong continent and what in the hell is everybody being reasonable about and according to the Times this week back in 1966 the C.I.A. decided that they had this problem and the problem was a man named Nkrumah so they killed him and before that it was Patrice Lumumba and before that it was my father on the campus of my Ivy League school and my father afraid to walk into the cafeteria because he said he was wrong the wrong age the wrong skin the wrong gender identity and he was paying my tuition and before that it was my father saying I was wrong saying that I should have been a boy because he wanted one/a boy and that I should have been lighter skinned and that I should have had straighter hair and that I should not be so boy crazy but instead I should just be one/a boy and before that it was my mother pleading plastic surgery for my nose and braces for my teeth and telling me to let the books loose to let them loose in other words I am very familiar with the problems of the C.I.A. and the problems of South Africa and the problems of Exxon Corporation and the problems of white America in general and the problems of the teachers and the preachers and the F.B.I. and the social workers and my particular Mom and Dad/I am very familiar with the problems because the problems turn out to be me I am the history of rape I am the history of the rejection of who I am I am the history of the terrorized incarceration of myself I am the history of battery assault and limitless armies against whatever I want to do with my mind and my body and my soul and whether it’s about walking out at night or whether it’s about the love that I feel or whether it’s about the sanctity of my vagina or the sanctity of my national boundaries or the sanctity of my leaders or the sanctity of each and every desire that I know from my personal and idiosyncratic and indisputably single and singular heart I have been raped be- cause I have been wrong the wrong sex the wrong age the wrong skin the wrong nose the wrong hair the wrong need the wrong dream the wrong geographic the wrong sartorial I I have been the meaning of rape I have been the problem everyone seeks to eliminate by forced penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/ but let this be unmistakable this poem is not consent I do not consent to my mother to my father to the teachers to the F.B.I. to South Africa to Bedford-Stuy to Park Avenue to American Airlines to the hardon idlers on the corners to the sneaky creeps in cars I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name My name is my own my own my own and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this but I can tell you that from now on my resistance my simple and daily and nightly self-determination may very well cost you your life

Always a broom leaned against a wall, meals never on time, if they come at all. Days without dates through which she moves empty and stubborn, slightly confused. Ironing hung dejectedly over a chair, gestures that come from who-knows-where. Old letters unanswered, piled together, papers and pills stuffed deep in a drawer. Thankful to be part of your heart’s great whole yet devoted to the limits of her own small skull. O orderly biped, take heed, leave her alone—let her read.

The age demanded an image of its accelerated grimace —Ezra Pound Idiot Wind, Blowin' every time you move your teeth —Bob Dylan You were energized by your epoch. The difference between a harmless nut—John Doe, Jane Doe, plain Jane, practically any mediocrity—standing on a beach and the same harmless nut riding a wave of (now) cultural self-righteousness about to tube. A tsunami armed with thunderbolts. Empowered—yea, packing. You played everything to the sympathetic studio theater of your hearers, a chorus-cum-sounding-board. They were your doo-wop boys and girls, your clique and claque and Marshall stack. The church hall chairs scraped, the cheap black crepe backdrop rustled “cutting edge” at you. You paid attention to how they oohed and aahed for you, and then pantomime hissed, and balled their fists and bayed for blood: the half-lustful half-men betraying their half-gender when they weren’t speculating what you were like in bed, the frightened girls who’d never seen anything like you but thought it might be fun (after Goth) to be a Maenad, the Pharisaic mothers going home to their chilly fires, their dim, furtive, put-upon husbands and their neo-feral offspring with a “there but for the grace of God” on their bony lips.

There are two kinds of people, soldiers and women, as Virginia Woolf said. Both for decoration only. Now that is too kind. It’s technical: virgins and wolves. We have choices now. Two little girls walk into a bar, one orders a shirley temple. Shirley Temple’s pimp comes over and says you won’t be sorry. She’s a fine piece of work but she don’t come cheap. Myself, I’m in less fear of predators than of walking around in my mother’s body. That’s sneaky, that’s more than naked. Let’s even it up: you go on fuming in your gray room. I am voracious alone. Blank and loose, metallic lingerie. And rare black-tipped cigarettes in a handmade basket case. Which of us weaves the world together with a quicker blur of armed seduction: your war-on-thugs, my body stockings. Ascetic or carnivore. Men will crack your glaze even if you leave them before morning. Pigs ride the sirens in packs. Ah, flesh, technoflesh, there are two kinds of people. Hot with mixed light, drunk on insult. You and me.

ONE From Sappho to myself, consider the fate of women. How unwomanly to discuss it! Like a noose or an albatross necktie The clinical sobriquet hangs us: codpiece coveters. Never mind these epithets; I myself have collected some honeys. Juvenal set us apart in denouncing our vices Which had grown, in part, from having been set apart: Women abused their spouses, cuckolded them, even plotted To poison them. Sensing, behind the violence of his manner— “Think I'm crazy or drunk?”—his emotional stake in us, As we forgive Strindberg and Nietzsche, we forgive all those Who cannot forget us. We are hyenas. Yes, we admit it. While men have politely debated free will, we have howled for it, Howl still, pacing the centuries, tragedy heroines. Some who sat quietly in the corner with their embroidery Were Defarges, stabbing the wool with the names of their ancient Oppressors, who ruled by the divine right of the male— I’m impatient of interruptions! I’m aware there were millions Of mutes for every Saint Joan or sainted Jane Austen, Who, vague-eyed and acquiescent, worshiped God as a man. I’m not concerned with those cabbageheads, not truly feminine But neutered by labor. I mean real women, like you and like me. Freed in fact, not in custom, lifted from furrow and scullery, Not obliged, now, to be the pot for the annual chicken, Have we begun to arrive in time? With our well-known Respect for life because it hurts so much to come out with it; Disdainful of “sovereignty,” “national honor;” and other abstractions; We can say, like the ancient Chinese to successive waves of invaders, “Relax, and let us absorb you. You can learn temperance In a more temperate climate.” Give us just a few decades Of grace, to encourage the fine art of acquiescence And we might save the race. Meanwhile, observe our creative chaos, Flux, efflorescence—whatever you care to call it! TWO I take as my theme “The Independent Woman,” Independent but maimed: observe the exigent neckties Choking violet writers; the sad slacks of stipple-faced matrons; Indigo intellectuals, crop-haired and callus-toed, Cute spectacles, chewed cuticles, aced out by full-time beauties In the race for a male. Retreating to drabness, bad manners, And sleeping with manuscripts. Forgive our transgressions Of old gallantries as we hitch in chairs, light our own cigarettes, Not expecting your care, having forfeited it by trying to get even. But we need dependency, cosseting, and well-treatment. So do men sometimes. Why don’t they admit it? We will be cows for a while, because babies howl for us, Be kittens or bitches, who want to eat grass now and then For the sake of our health. But the role of pastoral heroine Is not permanent, Jack. We want to get back to the meeting. Knitting booties and brows, tartars or termagants, ancient Fertility symbols, chained to our cycle, released Only in part by devices of hygiene and personal daintiness, Strapped into our girdles, held down, yet uplifted by man’s Ingenious constructions, holding coiffures in a breeze, Hobbled and swathed in whimsy, tripping on feminine Shoes with fool heels, losing our lipsticks, you, me, In ephemeral stockings, clutching our handbags and packages. Our masks, always in peril of smearing or cracking, In need of continuous check in the mirror or silverware, Keep us in thrall to ourselves, concerned with our surfaces. Look at man’s uniform drabness, his impersonal envelope! Over chicken wrists or meek shoulders, a formal, hard-fibered assurance. The drape of the male is designed to achieve self-forgetfulness. So, Sister, forget yourself a few times and see where it gets you: Up the creek, alone with your talent, sans everything else. You can wait for the menopause, and catch up on your reading. So primp, preen, prink, pluck, and prize your flesh, All posturings! All ravishment! All sensibility! Meanwhile, have you used your mind today? What pomegranate raised you from the dead, Springing, full-grown, from your own head, Athena? THREE I will speak about women of letters, for I’m in the racket. Our biggest successes to date? Old maids to a woman. And our saddest conspicuous failures? The married spinsters On loan to the husbands they treated like surrogate fathers. Think of that crew of self-pitiers, not-very-distant, Who carried the torch for themselves and got first-degree burns. Or the sad sonneteers, toast-and-teasdales we loved at thirteen; Middle-aged virgins seducing the puerile anthologists Through lust-of-the-mind; barbiturate-drenched Camilles With continuous periods, murmuring softly on sofas When poetry wasn’t a craft but a sickly effluvium, The air thick with incense, musk, and emotional blackmail. I suppose they reacted from an earlier womanly modesty When too many girls were scabs to their stricken sisterhood, Impugning our sex to stay in good with the men, Commencing their insecure bluster. How they must have swaggered When women themselves endorsed their own inferiority! Vestals, vassals, and vessels, rolled into several, They took notes in rolling syllabics, in careful journals, Aiming to please a posterity that despises them. But we’ll always have traitors who swear that a woman surrenders Her Supreme Function, by equating Art with aggression And failure with Femininity. Still, it’s just as unfair To equate Art with Femininity, like a prettily packaged commodity When we are the custodians of the world’s best-kept secret: Merely the private lives of one-half of humanity. But even with masculine dominance, we mares and mistresses Produced some sleek saboteuses, making their cracks Which the porridge-brained males of the day were too thick to perceive, Mistaking young hornets for perfectly harmless bumblebees. Being thought innocuous rouses some women to frenzy; They try to be ugly by aping the ways of men And succeed. Swearing, sucking cigars and scorching the bedspread, Slopping straight shots, eyes blotted, vanity-blown In the expectation of glory:she writes like a man! This drives other women mad in a mist of chiffon. (One poetess draped her gauze over red flannels, a practical feminist.) But we’re emerging from all that, more or less, Except for some ladylike laggards and Quarterly priestesses Who flog men for fun, and kick women to maim competition. Now, if we struggle abnormally, we may almost seem normal; If we submerge our self-pity in disciplined industry; If we stand up and be hated, and swear not to sleep with editors; If we regard ourselves formally, respecting our true limitations Without making an unseemly show of trying to unfreeze our assets; Keeping our heads and our pride while remaining unmarried; And if wedded, kill guilt in its tracks when we stack up the dishes And defect to the typewriter. And if mothers, believe in the luck of our children, Whom we forbid to devour us, whom we shall not devour, And the luck of our husbands and lovers, who keep free women.

The process of through is ongoing. The earth doesn’t seem to move, but sometimes we fall down against it and seem to briefly alight on its turning. We were just going. I was just leaving, which is to say, coming elsewhere. Transient. I was going as I came, the words move through my limbs, lungs,                mouth, as I appear to sit peacefully at your hearth           transubstantiating some wine. It was a rough red,              it was one of those nights we were not forced by circumstances                       to drink wine out of mugs. Circumstances being,      in those cases, no one had been transfixed at the kitchen sink long enough       to wash dishes. I brought armfuls of wood           from the splitting stump. Many of them, because it was cold,      went right on top of their recent ancestors.              It was an ice night. They transpired visibly,            resin to spark, bark to smoke, wood to ash.        I was transgendering and drinking     the rough red at roughly the same rate           and everyone who looked, saw. The translucence of flames       beat against the air against our skins.                          This can be done with or without clothes on.               This can be done with or without wine or whiskey        but never without water: evaporation is also ongoing.       Most visibly in this case in the form of wisps of steam     rising from the just washed hair of a form at the fire whose beauty was                  in the earth’s turning, that night and many nights,      transcendent. I felt heat changing me.                    The word for this is transdesire, but in extreme cases                 we call it transdire