I Am A Citizen Of A Country

I Am A Citizen Of A Country That Has Just Undergone A Thieved Election, A Country Deeply And Dangerously Divided Between Rich And Poor, But Also Between Rich And Middle Class. What I Believe In And What My Government Represents Are Not The Same Thing.

... If, As Women, We Accept A Philosophy Of History That Asserts That Women Are By Definition Assimilated Into The Male Universal,that We Can Understand Our Past Through A Male Lens--if We Are Unaware That Women Even Have A History--we Live Our Lives Similarly Unanchored, Drifting In Response To A Veering Wind Of Myth And Bias.

Nothing Could Have Prepared Me For The Realization That I Was A Mother ... When I Knew I Was Still In A State Of Uncreation Myself.

No Woman Is Really An Insider In The Institutions Fathered By Masculine Consciousness. When We Allow Ourselves To Believe We Are, We Lose Touch With Parts Of Ourselves Defined As Unacceptable By That Consciousness; With The Vital Toughness And Visionary Strength Of The Angry Grandmothers, The Fierce Market Women Of The Ibo's Women's War, The Marriage-resisting Women Silk Workers Of Pre-revolutionary China, The Millions Of Widows, Midwives, And The Women Healers Tortured And Burned As Witches For Three Centuries In Europe.

For Now, Poetry Has The Capacity - In Its Own Ways And By Its Own Means - To Remind Us Of Something We Are Forbidden To See.