Who wouldn't want to be pleasing? Who wouldn't want to say yes to every bit of teeming life in this world?
And yet in order to embrace the world with sustainable energy and enthusiasm, a lot of dead skin has to be sloughed off.
Here is a poem I wrote on the subject:
BEFORE DAWN
Let me acknowledge this darkness, its pain
and its fears.
Let me report what I have seen in this
world I have chosen to love.
Let me say this:
no to the woman with the bandaged gash on
her forehead serving her husband at the dinner table
no to the woman kneeling in her pew in her
best Sunday hat in preparation for being insulted from the pulpit
no to the woman with daintily crossed
ankles waiting for someone, anyone, to ask her to dance
no to the woman doctor refusing to
prescribe birth control unless the girl’s pious parents sign for it
no to male egos that love to be coddled by
women’s love and then despise the lovers for loving
no to greedy women who make it even more
difficult for the rest of us
no to genital mutilations, physical and
emotional
no to the stranglehold on all of our
desires
no to prurient Lolita worship
no to good-natured Molly Bloom contempt
no to everything that forces us to choose
between prudery and promiscuity
no to women who refuse to be feminists,
even though that includes beauties like Doris Lessing and Mary Oliver, whom I
love
no to the concept of post-feminism—it isn’t
over until beauty sings
no to a mother being expected to suffer and
then smile anyway
no to people who want us to smile and get
over it rather than reporting our pain
no to the teenage brother whose ears turn
pink at his sister’s first period
no to embarrassment
no to an orthodox Jewish men’s prayer that
thanks god for not having created them women
no to the newly married woman who gives up
teaching because her husband’s religion forbids that any woman should teach any
male, even a little boy in pre-school ballet
no to the anger that half of the human race
is so accepting of the status quo that would make me and mine be his servants
in hell rather than having an equal in heaven
no to women dwindling upon marriage out of
kindness
no to women earning jewels and mansions and
political office by cajoling the status quo
no to giving less importance to preparing a
woman for childbirth than to preparing men for killing other mother’s children
no to the discomfort of having to say no
no to the religions of nothingness,
nirvana, the next life, this life nailed to the cross or being dismissed as
illusion
I am not an illusion and my day is dawning.
I will praise it and the beauty I will find.
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