I am not sure what this poem means. I guess it is true enough, that I think you women are more courageous than men when you get your shit together. I think you are more pain tolerant too. On the other hand, I also think you get a built in connection to the planet that lies deeper than we men get. I don't think you live longer on average than men because of your grit, but because of the connection. This alignment of woman and earth is on display when you give birth as the umbilical chord. When it is severed the woman child can find it again within, but the man child has lost something and he seeks it the rest of his life.
He will project it and invent patriarchal religion. Women tend to keep the mysteries when freed of patriarchal societies. But just as gay society shows now, there are men with enough woman in them that they don't fit the mold. I am not gay, but I do have enough feminine in me that I do not fit the mold. Somewhere in my twenties I stopped caring about that.
What I do care about, the yearning that I am left with ever since they snipped the chord and my foreskin, has bedeviled me, forced me to make up all sorts of crazy shit. At least I have gotten good at it and write a pretty good poem now.
Oh by the way, you women are not exempt. But if you yearn like me, that means you have enough man in you. :D
The Truth Tonight
If I had courage
I would have been born female.
I bargained carefully
and came out a male
in this timezone, for this work.
If I had more grace
I would honor you
with crimson flowers to match
your deep warm red blood.
March 23, 2009 8:33 PM
Contraction
1 week ago
Chrstopher, this is great!
ReplyDeleteI love it. I went to an energy reader lately, and one of the things she said is that somewhere at birth i was disappointed to be born female. I have no recollection of that, but i do know i love my warm red blood :) It's my moon time now. And i will miss it when it ceases, for some strange reason, i don't know many women that like their periods like i do. Christopher! this is women's talk, how come i am talking to you :)
I don't know either. I am not offended.
ReplyDeleteLoving you, m'dear.
Please don't take this the wrong way, Christopher and other men who read this comment, but I have always felt sort of sorry for men just because they are not female. I think you articulate my reasons well, Christopher.
ReplyDeleteTo Jozien - when you move to the next phase of your life, you will embrace that, too, for the new depths of wisdom your body will have earned.
Karen!! Please don't take this the wrong way. You've become a crone :D
ReplyDeleteMy mother used to say, it takes a man to really see a woman just as it takes a woman to really see a man. She of course did not mean all men and all women. She meant the awake man, the awake woman. Actually she was saying this in terms of the novelist, poet, playwright. She said the best women in print are written by men, the best men by women. She was an English teacher.
Okay..since it is all people I know here (at the moment) and everyone is talking women talk... well, I am totally missing my moon cycle. :( I dream now of bleeding. I dream of pregnancy. AND I wake hot to touch and burning from the inside. So I yearn. My yearning is nearly an unbearable thing at the moment. Does that make me more a man now? I wonder.
ReplyDeleteAlways so much to think about when I come here, Christopher!
Liz, I realized, after getting all deep about your questions that you don't really require answers from me. You already know and I know you do. I will only say that powerful medicine is a significant stress. You have spoken freely of that. So are powerful emotional states. You so clearly live within emotional storms.
ReplyDeleteI love you and touch you there, just so.
I've been treading water for a week or so, and your past few posts....and especially this one, have been sweet rain .... the kind I can take on the face, taste and touch with simplicity and gratitude.
ReplyDeleteShrug - Nobody's perfect...
ReplyDeleteA SPIDER sewed at night
ReplyDeleteWithout a light
Upon an arc of white.
If ruff it was of dame
Or shroud of gnome, 5
Himself, himself inform.
Of immortality
His strategy
Was physiognomy.
Emily Dickenson(1830–86)
the 5 doesn't belong there... don't now where it came from.
ReplyDelete:D {{{Lucy!!}}} Maybe your dog gets close sometimes.
ReplyDeleteGhost, those pesky 5s. I just replaced my totaled Hyundai with a Mazda 5. I guess that's where it came from. Thanks for Emily, though I confess I often don't track my way through all her lines. I like them as sounds though.
and of course you don't understand it.... you're not a spider. you've turned off your avatars and i shan't stop whining about it.... you're lucky i spare you all my whining here!
ReplyDeleteI take no offense at being called a crone, believing that you mean it in the sense of the triple goddess, the wisdom of the waning moon. Emily, too, was in this aspect as she wove her poems, so I find myself in good company. Thank you, Ghost! You've given me an Emily evening.
ReplyDeleteActually, Ghost, not that many years ago I was called a spider to my face because some people thought I was a predator around women, weaving a web and drawing them in for my own obscure purposes.
ReplyDeleteKaren, yes indeed I would mean "Old hag" the same way but it is harder to get away with it. :)
I am both man and woman, and I would like to say a balance of each but they often offset each other. And as I get closer to losing this sacred period (not to me, dear sweet women - out out red stain!) I actually feel more woman. Isn't that quite the contradiction?
ReplyDeleteI find that in men such as yourself, if I could be presumptious for a moment, it is the bravery of self that suggests woman. And I'm not so sure it is fair to equate that with being female but so we do. A stripping down to self and allowing to be, to muse, to dig within, to be easy and soft - we see that as being woman. Whatever it is, it is what wins me to a man. It is what broaches the divide and draws me to him. Call it feminine, call it a deepness, call it art - he has to have it. I recognize that in myself now. I need a man of beauty. I have been lucky to know one or two.
xo
erin
:-)
ReplyDelete