Poems on Gender
TWO SPIRIT
They gave us the Enlightenment
We thanked them with genocide
Their freedoms appalled the missionaries
But their ideas inspired Rousseau and Voltaire
The shoeless warriors of the Paris streets
When they stormed the Bastille
Were marching to a native beat
We killed them in the tens of millions
Cut down their forests
Slaughtered the animals
Salted the earth with slavery and disease
Now we come to pick over the bones
And use them as weapons
For our fashionable ideas
Two Spirit
Does not belong to us
It belongs to the cultures we destroyed
Over sixty thousand years of human history
Shattered, wisdom buried, wonders lost
I have read about cities, vast in scale
That rose up with a harvest moon
And then melted away in the spring
I have read that you could start
At the mouth of the Mississippi
Travel north to the Great Lakes
Through many tribes and villages
Many different languages
Many customs and traditions
And always find a welcome
I have read about the Turtle and the Bear
The Wolf, the Elk and the Beaver Clans
I have read that in some places, some times
If you had a dream
And it told you what to do
You had to do it
And anyone you met
If you told them about it
They had to help you out
We have glimpses of times and places
Where women and men were friends
Where both sexes were respected
Where the rules of gender
Had many different meanings
Many different variations
And sometimes, maybe
Were not even rules at all
This was no lost paradise
It was life, blossom and thorn
There were wars, empires, slavery
Mistakes made, lessons learned
Revolutions of every kind
We have so many stories
Good and bad, terrible and surprising
But all just a tiny sliver of what was lost
Time and murder have done their work
There are only these last precious flowers
That survived into the modern world
From the land we slashed and burned
We can respect the flowers
We can be inspired by them
But we cannot copy them
We cannot own them
We cannot graft them onto the world we made
Onto the cancerous bones of class and sex and race
We cannot pretend ourselves out of the history we created
Leonard Peltier is dying in prison
Native women are still disappearing
The war against the land and its people
Goes on
The war against women
Goes on
The war against the poor
Goes on
We have no license to speak for those who survived
The genocide our ancestors brought with them
No license to spend their culture like easy money
To decorate the crimes and cruelties
Of a world we must destroy and build anew
First Peoples have a right to self-determination
The entire planet cries out for revolution
The war goes on – and we are losing
So tempting to crawl back into a land of fantasy
Where the personal is political and nothing else counts
But the war goes on – time is running out
It’s good to learn from different cultures
Dangerous to imagine we understand what we don’t
The past can be a magic mirror that shows us
Just exactly what we want to see
Or it can be an inspiration
All these things were possible
How many more?
What else can we do?
There are two sexes
Male and female
It takes one of each to make a baby
But what this means – what we make of it
Has changed more times than we can imagine
It will change in the future
It’s changing now
If we are to choose the direction of that change
We must start with an honest look at the world we’ve made
Women have been oppressed by men through all of recorded history
From the cities of the Nile and the Tigris and Euphrates
Down through the ages
Male supremacy
Embedded in the laws and institutions
Feeding into and fed by slavery, property, class war and violence
Gender is how they control us. Gender is how they divide us
Masculine and feminine are not different options
They’re different forms of oppression
We need a repolarisation
Not the masculine and the feminine
But the good and the bad
The kind and the cruel
The brave and the cowardly
The rebel heart or the mind in slavery
