Sins of Omission

If I'm honest

I'd have to admit

that some part of me felt shame

at loving you 

a woman 


Afraid of what it would mean

to be seen as something other than

a standard bearing girl

As though the omission

of a phallus was an unthinkable abdication

of my desiring to be desired


As if I had not been raised

on the fantasy of being a woman lifted

in the arms of a larger man who

made me feel small and

could carry me easily off to bed

dutifully ignoring the threat

inherent in the dichotomy


And how as I allowed myself 

to fall for you I only knew to mimic

what I thought you wanted in a man

taking pleasure in play acting

the other side but failing to see 

it was the same unequal script 


And how I know now

we were resplendent in our softness

with nothing missing but 

the expectations we had swallowed

that omitted the truths 

of our irresistable love

As Within, So Without

We are indoctrinated to invalidate feminine power any time we see it

We accomplish this with many different attacks but they all come quickly & forcibly

We might say a woman with power is shrill or schoolmarmish or not believable or an outright liar, someone who cannot be trusted; Eve, after all

We might say we ourselves do not object to a powerful woman but that everyone else will and in that way invalidate feminine power

We might sexualize her power in an attempt to diminish her and the very next minute 'righteously' abraid her when she rejects our sexualization and not only claims her own sexuality but shares it in accordance with her own power

We find ourselves feeling shame for reasons we haven 't got words for yet when we see a powerful woman asserting herself privately or publicly

We try to make the powerful woman feel our shame too, to be ashamed of herself and go back to quiet complicity with a world that grants her small quarter

We rewrite and we erase historical records of feminine accomplishment, we deny women access to certain spaces & mantles, we say that feminine work is intellectually & creatively inferior to male work across nearly all fields

We keep feminine power safely contained in our homes, demanding that it keep us fed, with clean clothes and environment, catering to our every comfort as we go about our business of overharvesting our earth's riches, mismanaging her abundances, creating unnecessary need while filling her with our detritus and poisins; in short, we treat our Earth as we treat our mothers, we take them for granted

We actively participate in a practice of collective imbalance and we are suffering for it without correctly identifying the source

Feminine power is myriad & I will not shame it or be shamed by it, I will listen to its substance & evaluate its results for myself. I will free myself of the bad tapes in my head & write my own program to follow.