Your women's liberation has failed. As you sit at home
smoking your food stamp cigarettes and eating
government cheese, I keep reminiscing about all
the free-thought you taught me shortly after the 70's.
You taught me about free-love, and then showed me
a life with the state as my father, and a life with unruly
children. You taught me about women making their own
decisions only to be shown the sweetheart who pushes
abortion instead of being responsible for his own
sexuality.
Independence is not drug use,
liberation is not negligence.
Now I stand before the world so changed by reckless
generations and see these opportunities you have
provided as a burden on my womanhood.
Equal rights is a human issue - not a gender.
We should be respected
for who and what we are, not expected
to be standardized, de-gendered.
Now I must negotiate my right
to educate my perspective children
outside of this standardization in order
to give then a structure beyond glorified feudalism.
I must re-prove the value
of feminine gentleness and fortitude.
Why is it that you doubted your own
skills and ability? What is so distasteful
to you about providing a happy home?
Is there really anything more important?
I refuse to be a women without regard
to my given attributes. I will relish in the fact
that I am able to practice the home arts - I will
feed my friends and family with butter-crust love
and heal wounds with kisses. Empowerment
comes from being - and appreciated - for being
who you are.
I do not want to transcend my natural assets -
I want to be loved for being the barer of all
human civilization. That is what I call respect.
Let's face it. The pants suit will never
get you as far as the little red dress.
Your sex should be dignified,
your love should be won.
I have been suppressed by all your political correctness.
Now let me show you how it's really done.
Yours truly,
daughter
About Me (poetry)
- Laura Cooper
- Portland, OR, United States
- Hello. I'm a product of the melting pot, post-boil, writing poems and advice and stories and songs, sharing my ideas to the best of what truth can spare me.
2 comments:
Amazing.
This really does a good job of speaking to a problem that I constantly encounter - our generation has no leadership from the generation that preceded us. (Unless leadership means "don't do as I do and don't do as I say.") I realize that I have biases that skew my view on the following, but it seems that culturally our society is a mess, financially the same, and politically as well. It's wrong to say that there is no leadership, but truthfully, most wisdom that the baby boomers have to offer, as a group, is entirely useless. That leaves the teenagers, the twenty somethings, the thirty something and the seventy and eighty year olds. So much of what I hear from other generations seems to be laced with something entirely sordid. At the moment, I will call it "statism," but I bet it is something much bigger. In this poem, you do an awesome job of capturing this feeling that I have and then applying it to your own situation concretely, or at least through a voice that sounds like it could come from you concretely. Well done, dear L. Cooper.
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