My Feminist Garden

 

I am a seventy-five-year-old poet

                  who writes lyrical poems

                  tuned to iambic pentameter.

Today, I want to write a modern poem

                  about daffodils I planted in October.

Some line up in a row by the split rail fence,

                  but more often now I plant them in clusters.

I’ve learned over the years that one flower

                  isn’t beautiful because she stands

                  next to one that is plain.

In clusters, or circles, the yellow bells

                  sing like a choir of sopranos.

That simile slips out from the lyrical

                  voice I am trying to suppress,

                  in order to present as post-modern.

Yet, over seven decades, I’ve learned to be heard

                  by suggestion, not assertion,

                  a voice others call strident in women.

I have endured cruel winters

                  like my green daffodils

                  standing unblossomed in March.

January tricked them with moderate rain,

                  so they pushed through soil

                  before February snow muffled their mouths.

The package of bulbs boasted

                  they would regenerate each spring

                  without my having to do a thing.

It is like a law, once passed —

                  say a woman has a right

                  to choose motherhood or not —

                  forever she might decide.

Yet, I return to our nation’s capital to march.

                  holding high a drawing my granddaughter made–

                  a uterus with flowers growing from within

                  reading Not a Political Object.

Two generations from my granddaughter,

                 my seed within her germinates

                  in colors I will not live to see.

She speaks in phrases I did not have:

                  sexual harassment, right-to-choose

                  equal pay for equal work.

She didn’t have to work at the corner drug,

                  where the pharmacist draped mistletoe

                  above the counter where I reached

                  for packages to deliver to nursing homes.

I am straying from my struggling daffodils,

                  something I do often these days,

                  meandering like Wordsworth in my garden.

I text my granddaughter to tell her

                  I enrolled in a University class:

                  The Philosophy of Feminism.

She texts back: Woohoo!

Spring arrives in twenty days,

                  but I have history on my side —

                  the bulbs I planted will bloom.

I will still need to pull weeds.

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