Fancy Dinosaur

I was ironing my fancy soul when the phone rang. It was God. He said, I’m not dead, and I’m calling those who still iron their fancy souls to give me praise.

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in the experience that most deeply engages our intellect and our hearts? Can the writer renew our hope for literary forms? Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand--
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep--while I weep!

I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.

That your sex are naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute; but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend. Why, then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity? Men of sense in all ages abhor those customs which treat us only as vassals of your sex; regard us then as beings placed by Providence under your protection, and in imitation of the Supreme Being make use of that power only for our happiness.

Abigail Adams, March 31, 1776

Feminism

All over the world, Little Bees, Star Scouts,
and Blue Birds play telephone, whispering messages
in a chain link of ears—no repeating (that’s cheating),
only relaying what they hear their first shot.
Sometimes “Molly loves Billy” becomes “ A Holiday in Fiji,”
or “Do the Right Thing” becomes “The Man Who Would Be King.”
Still, there is trust. Girls taking the Blind Walk,
a bandana around one’s eyes (Pin the Tail on the Donkey-Style)
as another leads her through the woods
or a backyard or entire city blocks. Girls helping
where they are needed or inventing ways to aid
where they are seemingly not.