Like washing being hung on the next line,
A different story to Shakespeare’s age
Is the one where women are writing truth
And scurrying to meet your daily chores
Is no mean feat, especially when the
Rhyme should be at the end of the...Whores!
Or witches, back in the day, but not now.
We have a voice, we’ll have them in stitches,
Like Wonder Woman, we’ll shout Ker Pow!
And the word that didn’t rhyme was THE TRUTH.
This poem is my beginning thoughts on this week’s word for ‘Drop in the Ocean’, the Monday night get together over on Discord, on the #BuddyUp channel. I’m looking at different points of view. There are so many to choose from.
As a woman, I have my gender view. The lens I look out from to see the world. And that view sometimes feels kaleidoscopic. There is no one size fits all. But at times I feel the constraints of the role. The little girl in me is still looking out. She’s a little bit frightened of what she sees.
But then the toughened shell she had as a teenager, the one she earned? Put on? Developed? Was forced into? That shell allowed her to go forward. She became outwardly hard. No one but a very few were allowed near. That other role is still there sometimes. But thankfully less so.
It was just a time when I loved ‘Shakespeare’s Sister’, no not in the Katy Perry kind of way. They were a UK girl group, well, duo and I loved how different they were. It was my ‘almost’ Goth moment. Instead of going full out and dying my hair black I read Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre over and over again. Surely, that counts.
Because as well as being female there are other points of view I have to take into account. My location, where I was from, who my friends were and my working class roots. These held me in their thrall during the early period of my life, and still now hold a nostalgic sense of something special. They meant I could read about the excitement but not necessarily join it, or be a part of it. There was definitely a wall. Maybe not literal but high all the same.
But when I imagine my inner Goth, I know she rocks, even if she’s never really come out to play. She’s there in the wings. She’s in there with those other brilliant characters I’ve met throughout life, both fictional and real. The people I’ve brushed up against both in the world of literature and in my waking life they have often changed my way of seeing things.
Look at Leon Uris...his books were really anti-british, and I missed the capital on purpose! He made me question my national pride. He made me become interested in history and politics. He made me angry. He made me look deeper at my allegiances. It’s when I realised that not all men are the same. And you know what I don’t give a damn that I used the word ‘men’ there. It’s a collective noun and speaks to me as someone who sees beyond labels.
I don’t want to be defined by just one thing. Not my sex, not my colour, not my nationality, my age, and on, and on. I want to be defined by the bounces I have, where I bump into new people, by the astonishing experiences I have, the belly laughs, the intimate smile between friends, the connections I choose and those that I don’t.
I want to choose my point of view and I’m looking into the horizon. It’s full of possibilities.
