Collection 14: Against Misogyny

Bone of my bone, Furies and Gorgons, Bearing the image

I am appalled by misogyny, which I see as a refuge for insecure men. I believe it's because they are afraid of women that these inadequates seek to manipulate and coerce them. Confident men should always seek to affirm and bless women, and I hope these poems do that. Every writer with a conscience should speak out against the current rise in misogyny, fuelled by torrents of pornography and social media's deplorable dehumanisation of everyone who is different from me.

Genesis records that the first human utterance was a love poem - Adam's "At last!" when he finally meets Eve. Unfortunately we are not told what Eve said on this momentous occasion. Here's my guess at it...

Bone of my bone

In a velvet purse

I keep blood and treasure,

destiny and source –

fear my hips' swagger!

You are the pen that skids

lightly on the paper.

I am the book that holds

the word for ever.

I am you and not you

both kin and stranger

like lover and like foe

I demand surrender.

We often look back to the Greeks for the origins of rational enquiry, enlightenment and democracy, especially those commentators who are embarrassed to acknowledge the huge debt we owe to Christendom's values and culture. Sadly though the Greeks had no time whatever for women's participation in their intellectual and poilitical life. Reflecting on this led me to notice that the monsters of the Greek imagination - the Furies and Gorgons - were often female. In some dark area of their psyche, were those macho Greeks expressing the fear and hate that underlay their misogyny?

Furies and Gorgons

Blusterless Agamemnon

The wind gone from your sails

Buy a fair breeze

With your daughter’s blood

And get a hurricane

With talons in it.

Medusa rises from the abyss

With serpents rising from her hair

Each slithering shape gazing

With the face of the oppressed:

Despised daughters, belittled

Sisters, grieving mothers,

Abandoned widows and

Rejected lovers.

Quick, Perseus!

Raise your mirror 

before their stares

Strike home into 

your stony heart.

Back to Genesis and the Garden again... The man and the woman were both created in the image of God - perhaps especially through their mutual love? But perhaps the woman reflects the divine image, at least in certain respects, better than the man?

Bearing the image

Still without memory, still unaware

Of any possibility of future, there

Sprawls Adam in his golden thoughtlessness

Upon the green of Eden, where he is

Contemplated. While he continues whole

Completeness only incompletes his role.

The cut is deep. A trail of scarlet blood

Leads to where Eve too slumbers upon sward.

Adam’s wound will close, hers will remain.

New life is only birthed in blood and pain.

She dreams of a thorned and weaponed future where

A cross awaits the offspring she will bear

And now the image opens in her eyes 

Of Love most fully given when it dies.