Tulips, May 2014
Don't forget to pick up a bottle of wine for your Mom for Mother's Day. After all, you're one of the reasons she drinks.
anonymous
May is one of the most beautiful months of the year as long as the sun shines.
Although we're in the middle of spring, it has been rather chilly.
I think that's why the Mother's Day falls on the second Sunday of May. Whoever chose the time of year for Mother's Day picked a perfect time of year. The trees are in bloom, and there are flowers everywhere. Retailers and online florists go crazy because they know there is serious money to be made selling flowers for people to give to Mom on her special day. As for me, I prefer chocolate and a meal at an ethnic restaurant, the more exotic, the better.
The problem with Mother's Day is this holiday discriminates against women who aren't mothers. I don't mind it when my children bring me gifts or take me out to lunch. I think Mother's Day is unfair, however, for women who chose not to have children and women who are unable to have children due to infertility. The role of mother is not the only game in town nowadays when women can do so much more with their lives than they were able to in the last century.
I prefer, instead, to celebrate International Women's Day on March 8th. (You can read about it on my other blog, The Alien Diaries). It is a day which honors all women. There is also International Men's Day in November (equal opportunity, you know) in November, although many people have not heard of it. These holidays are not observed in the States because Women's Day, especially is seen as a Communist plot. After, all, International Women's Day was a Russian idea, and the Russians have been getting a lot of bad press lately for the situation in Ukraine.
I don't understand why anyone would see a holiday for women as a bad thing. Only women can be mothers, but not all women want to be mothers. So why not celebrate all women?
A young female blogger made a big impression on me by speaking out against injustice, especially against women. The Republican Party here in the States would have women barefoot and pregnant if they had their way,
The young woman, whose name Madison Kimrey is an atheist and lives in the Bible Belt. I imagine she gets a lot of flak from the Bible Thumpers where she lives. I give her a lot of credit for standing up against injustice, whether it is discrimination against the female gender, or the fact that she notices the United States is turning into a theocracy. It's the Christian Right who are behind this. They feel that the United States is a Christian nation. This notion makes me very uncomfortable, since this country was founded upon separation of church and state.
Fundamentalist religion subjugates women, and makes them second class citizens. There is a jihad going on in this country, and it's not coming from Islamic terrorists, but from Fundamentalist Christians and Tea Party Republicans who try to force their fanatical brand of religion on the rest of us. I ain't buying.
Speaking of religion, I have had some bad experiences that I was a little girl in Catholic school. Back in the old days, the Catholic schools were run by nuns who had no problem hitting young children with ruler and pointers. It was seen as discipline, you know the Bible aphorism "spare the rod and spoil the child." The punishment they doled out on these kids would be seen as child abuse nowadays. The nuns couldn't deal with the likes of me and kicked me out of school, so I attended public school, which I liked much better.
To this day, I avoid religion which is something that I see as crowd and mind control, although I respect the right of people to worship as they see fit. Just don't try to convert me.
Even though I'm a mother and a grandmother, I raised my girls to be strong women, and taught them to question everything. I'm glad they are following in my footsteps.
It's time to get off the soapbox since I've been standing on it too long.
Several years ago I wrote a poem based (loosely) on Heine's Lorelei. Heine was a German poet who also happened to be Jewish. He was persona non grata in Hitler's Germany, (even though he was dead a long time by then) and his books were burned, along with other works authored by those repugnant to the Nazi Party. Heine, too, would have been burned had he been around during the Nazi era. This is the kind of thing that happens when discrimination turns into downright hatred, and Hitler and his cronies had a passionate hatred of Jewish people.
Fortunately, the Nazis and their followers did not take over the world, and they lost the war.
Many years ago I had the good fortune to live in Germany, not far from the Lorelei. My husband and I often visited St. Goar, a tourist trap type town on the Rhine, across the river from that infamous rock. German legend had it that a siren lived on top of the rock and sang to lure the sailors and the bargemen, and led them towards disaster.
This barge, which had just passed the Lorelei, got through the gorge in one piece. If it had crashed it would have meant death by hypothermia (or worse) for those aboard.
Rheingau by St. Goar, in February
Since I've saved the best for last, here's my poem Siren's Song. It's an excerpt from my chapbook The Visionary, and you can also find it in the anthology The Art of Being Human, Volume 7: Sagittarius2-Love Poems. . Also, please pardon the crazy formatting. Microsoft Word gets lost in translation on Blogger.
I knew you from
another
lifetime
and I'm sure
I saw you once
in this one.
You were in a
dream of mine
and years
later I saw you
a young man
standing
across the river.
I never forgot
the siren song of your smile
and the beauty of your eyes
for that brief moment.
I search for you everywhere.
You are always on my mind
yet I don't even know who you are.
But if I ever met you I'd be
tempted
to leave my husband
and crash on the rocks
to repeat history
this time around.
Something in my soul told me
you had once loved me
and the affair had ended sadly.
Would I sell my soul
for a second chance?
Yes.
Copyright © 2014 Katley Demetria Brown. Site Designed by Katley Demetria Brown. Poetry and artwork on this site may not be reproduced or copied without permission of the author.
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