F&M In Russian Poem by Larisa Rzhepishevska

Feminine and masculine nouns.
Please, don’t frown!
I am not going to teach.
I would like to show some nouns in Russian speech.
Tenderness and kindness, beauty and faith,
freedom and wisdom, love and dove….,
they are all females.
There are some in Russian tales:
a golden fish, which fulfills your wish,
a ginger fox with her cunning talks.
A slender birch is like a girl with her hair curled.
An apple tree in her blossom is awesome.
A light foot gazelle, a chanterelle are feminine nouns.
And even in English they sound like tender bells.
Our mother Earth is certainly a female.
She gives birth to males.
Some of them are heroes from fairy tales.
A strong oak spoke:
I am only three hundred years old,
Who told that I am old?
I am young and still strong,
to the long living family I belong.
Saturn, Jupiter, Pluto, Mars,
and many other planets and stars,
they are masculine, but…Venus is feminine.
If a man is clumsy we call him an elephant or a bear.
Sometimes we compare a man with a crocodile,
it means he eats a lot,
and a woman is a bird.
I’ve heard that only a man can be called an eagle,
and a woman is a seagull.
Feminine and masculine nouns.
They are all the compounds of our language,
no one has an advantage.
They always flock together,
like birds of a feather.


©Larisa Rzhepishevska
November 20th,2010