Member-only story
No
A poem
girl treads on down across a world so flat
unlike Christopher Columbus dreamt
winding down nameless straits and deserts
‘til round world blossoms
towering summit she too emerges
tall, beaten by the sun, blistered
legend only by foregone artifact
both girl and woman continue steadfast
graced by the moon
through time, place and age-
Dark-Middle-Renaissance-Industrial-New
until Revolution stirs passion in her soul
heart aflutter, she arrives!
but not really
for it’s not about equal pay, rights to this
or rights to that
that’s come, time and time again
and gone
but-the-right-to-say NO.
~I wrote this about 12 years ago; it was the first piece I’d really written since the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. The trigger for this poem was that while I teaching Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” I pondered the fact that although women have come a long way in the past 50-plus years, many things have remained the same.
