A Feminist Engineer's Rant Poem by Gayathri Seetharam

A feminist engineer's rant
-Gayathri B. Seetharam
I made this discovery
And that is the epithet, man, for a woman,
Came from Virginia Woolf's tale, A Society,
And this in the circle of engineers, is a compliment and a tear bringing form of address,
For it comes too close to the truth, at times,
Or so I thought, but it was just that many a time,
I was unaware of admiration of the lover-like kind;

The same tale has the heroines extolling the virtues of men and their intellect
(and I will not spoil the tale for you readers) ,
Professing that men are superior to women in their intellect
And contrary to my days of youth and after,
When I had shown early promise,
I actually conceded to Mr. Obama and Mr. Harper in my unpublished essays about them,
And to PM Trudeau in my published on Facebook and Linked In essays,
That they were intellectual superiors;

Of course, they have all shone in their chosen paths
And I have partially recovered from the setback
That I had suffered in my career as an engineer-writer-artist
And I strongly object to the fact that I, as Virginia Woolf so aptly put it,
Have borne the child
While they have borne the books and the pictures and coloured the world stage;

As G.E. Moore in his essay, "The Refutation of Idealism" has clarified a thought or so one thinks,
In his argument of the colour, "blue", and the word, "consciousness",
By implying that the two go together
For blue implies transparency and when we look through it, we see nothing but the blue;

I, standing up for all female engineers-writers-artists, say that the colour, red, can be juxtaposed
With the word, important,
And red implies a clarity of vision
And when we look through it, we see a faint pink.