Maybe you’re thinking about your lost love
or looking at that spot on the wall where you meant
to hang a picture, and suddenly you realize
you forgot to turn the page on your calendar ---
another collection of wildebeests sent to you
by those conservation people.
Whatever happened to all those other calendars?
What year did you look at a new suffragette every month?
What about Georgia O’Keeffe and her suggestive flower petals?
The ancient goddess images, the dancing wiccans,
photos of the ERA march you did in '81?
* * * * *
The lady on the TV screen is grim:
Men are being marginalized in the colleges.
Androphobic women are taking over the system.
Lady professors are forcing students to watch
The Vagina Monologues and other scary things on stage.
Conservatives everywhere are horrified
at what’s happening in higher education.
And it’s all your fault.
Isn’t that refreshing?
Doris Henderson has a graduate degree in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, has taught, edited, facilitated, currently runs a writing workshop in Danbury, Connecticut. Her poems have been published in Slant, Comstock Review, Parting Gifts, Connecticut River Review and others, have won various awards and a Pushcart nomination. Her feminist activism spans several lifetimes.