Week 13 Storytelling: To My Women

The gods smiled.
Again
and
again they smiled.
The gods smiled down on a million men and gave them big strong muscles to string bows and lift mountains and so they did all of these spectacular things while the gods smiled all the wider.
Their teeth are stars.
When the great and wonderful
whoever
performed such great and magical feats of
whatever
the stories were written
so the heroes could be
lauded
remembered
revered
mimicked
by all of the ordinary people
that the gods
just
acknowledge.

But the women.

That's it.
That's every damn story.
But the women.
But they did this
or that,
don't forget that.
But they weren't enough this
or that,
you're getting it now.
Long ago it seems
every
single
woman
needed some sort of test or trial to prove that they were worthy but the measure of a woman's strength is not how much abuse she can bear because even women without the world's trauma are strong.

A young woman read about historic women and wondered at their trauma and was angry on their behalf,
because the men who wrote them didn't realize women had those sorts of human emotions,
and she wanted
she wanted so much
wanted more than those women were allowed
a young woman wanted to give them their agency and their victory
and she loved those women so much
loved them back to reality.
Many women did this.
This is how we know,
so stop arguing,
this is how we know there was a problem:
we
all
see
it.

But the women.
The women were lifted on the shoulders of other women and someday the newest women will lift us up and as long as we keep doing this no man can ever write us into a life of
tests
and
trials
and
trauma
again.

Author's Note: I really like to write poetry. It occurred to me, as I was brainstorming ideas for my story this week, that I hadn't written any poetry on Indian Epics, and I have a lot of feelings about Indian Epics, so here they are. There is no specific form, just because I really like freeform. It soothes me. It empties me in the best way. So, other than a few small references to Rama's bow stringing and Krishna's mountain lifting, this is dedicated to all the lovely women that I wanted to write about, but just couldn't quite find the time, or the right idea. This is my open love letter. The way I read this, lines on their own are punches, lines that are long run faster and faster, and italics are angry whispers. Maybe I'll try to embed a sound file.

Photo Source: Personal Photo of me with "Judith and her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes" by Artemisia Gentileschi, December 2016.