International Women’s Day – Family, Motorway to Manhood

I’ve learned a lot from men.
Who does the dishes, who sits in the living room.
How to use the bible like a sword.
Roll Bull Durham and chew Beech-Nut,
change oil on a 545 Cockshutt, and that
house parties and damn near everything else
start out fun and end in competition.

Maybe that’s why I’ve always been more comfortable around women.
Not that women aren’t competitive
          — take my lovely wife, geez!  badum-pshh —
it’s that more often than not a woman will stand up,
come over to your side of the board
and help you with your next move.
(Oh and let me add here that my wife’s life-long career
toward relational restoration, has been about lifting
embracing, sweetening, releasing, beginning with her kids.)

I should say as well that I learned much from my father:
decency, how to handle disappointment, and distance.
If mom was earth and moon, dad was Saturn,
still, how I loved those far-off inscrutable rings.

My big sister was a nurse. (Latin nutricius ‘person that nourishes’)
Had the heart for it. And the stomach.
And she could play the piano and sing like a flood,
like beauty and holy upon many waters.
Patron Saint Agatha with pipes.
She’ll tell you I’m piling it on or that time has changed that,
but it hasn’t, not for me, and as for her nutricius kindness,
well, richer and deeper each year.

My little sister played guitar for a while,
was a little wild back in the day
(curiously ending up in the legal profession).
She was more like me except cooler and more coordinated,
and she always drove sporty cars.
Often its the younger sibling that is owed the most apologies.
But I’ve never felt that from her. This is just another way
of saying I’ve known nothing but love from her.
And you know how good that feels.

I read women poets now. (Not exclusively.)
Men utilize language. Many are Cirque du Soleil athletic.
Women garden words. Plant, water, nurture,
the greening reaching beyond language
where good poetry wants to go.
Maybe it’s because a woman has better access to their childhood,
never needing to disown it along the motorway to manhood.

And so here we are, a day in a year to honour women.
On our way but a ways to go.
What with that little word men, housed and held in women,
as though women carry men, and the insecure among us
resent it.

Misogyny deeply scripted in the very language needed
to overcome it.

But let me step back. We know gender is a slurry.
(Here I bow to my used-to-be-daughter-now-son.)
Ghettos of exception? yes, but society
is moving beyond the binary.
(Still lead by science more than thoughtfulness.)

My two older brothers are thoughtful types.
Some early burly flashes of macho
but now all sunset and sensitive;
able to reckon with abstraction and
swim the lake of human emotion.
And is that not part of the evolution?