What if we had
a female president
right here on the ground
in 2014.
Would they make jokes about her blood on SNL?
Or compare her shocking term
to the spacious cycle of a lily?
Would hate or pity win?
I guess I don't want to do it
but I would like
dental insurance.
I care about my skull.
What if when I got my check
it was a decent portion
of a full year's salary
marking with the strength of math
every hour I'd spent
teaching children how to read.
Every winter in our world
I could use that money
to pay for my heat.
So sheepishly
raised by the dead
and dying men
I might step into
high hot water
and wait for spring.
Even once it drained
there wouldn't be much
space for someone else.
Opaque in my periphery
might stand steadily
the shapes of houses, settled sky,
ice crystals, concrete
grains and flowers,
clean April wind,
and my leaders, so good
at shutting doors.
What if my kid grew up in this
a little dead between the categories?
Is it not strange that man –
with the pages of history spread out before him –
is so slow to admit
the intellectual power,
the moral heroism of woman,
and her identity with himself.
If we could first know where we are
we could then better judge
what to do, and how to do it.
It will become all one thing
or all the other.
Where is the broad and generous confidence
in the efficiency of true
democratic institutions?
You cannot deny one class
the full measure of their natural rights
without imposing restraints
upon your own liberty.
These things were said by
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Abraham Lincoln,
and Carl something a century and a half ago.
Ten years later
Lincoln's long gone clamor
went wandering to claim that
the mystic chords of memory
stretching from every battlefield
and patriot grave, to every living heart
and hearthstone, all over this
broad land will yet swell
the chorus of the Union
when again touched, as surely they will be
by the better angels of our nature,
but I don't think it happened.
A few days ago
one of my students
argued against equal pay
while I stood in front of him.
The girl to his right
apologized after class
for being such an airhead.
When I was 14, this girl my age
was raped at school
and in the morning
they announced it.
She was called a liar and a dumb slut.
She transferred and I ran into her.
Maybe she'll be president.
It might be sort of like
how it is now
except we'd have a woman show the way
while we listened to her speak.
