International Women's Day 2020 Poem by Gayathri Seetharam

International WOMEN's Day 2020
-Gayathri B. Seetharam
We women have come a long way since
Shakespeare said, "Frailty thy name is woman" is his play, Hamlet,
This is at odds with English history for as his autobiography goes,
He lived in the times of Queen Elizabeth I;

And surely, queens were made of iron will and determination
And hence, despite being frail, they were strong and powerful,
This brings me to my main argument
That women were created for love and for feminism;

By feminism, I mean an equal possession of rights
To a beautiful education and work power
In Western mythology, in the story of Pygmalion and Galatea as depicted by Gerome,
The Goddess Aphrodite gives Galatea life
For she is a sculpture created by Pygmalion
And this is an evidence of love and creativity;


In Hindu mythology, the famous Sanskrit poet and playwright, Kalidasa,
Is an uneducated man
Who is shunned by the Princess who has married him
Thinking he is a wit
He prays to Kali, the Goddess of Strength and Power,
The Goddess writes the alphabet on his tongue;

There is an essential difference in storytelling here
In one, it is the Goddess of Love
And in the other, it is the Goddess of Power
In Hollywood creative stories, Woody Allen is blessed
By the 9 muses in the movie, Manhatten;

In the Isis Panthea tales, the indigenous woman was created first, before man,
In Leon Lederman's book, The God Particle,
It is a Goddess who made the boson and the universe
And I say that it is Mother Earth who is bountiful
And Mother Nature who is beautiful and fearsome
But Father Time who puts a measure on things
And Father Frost who controls the level of coldness;

God is surely a man for a man begins procreation
If it is so, he is in some ways, just,
For after the pain of labour or a C-section, for a woman
There is the pleasure of holding and breastfeeding the baby
That she has given birth to.

Acknowledgements:
1. Autumn de Wilde's interview in The New Yorker by Sarah Land
2. Nature, Culture and Gender: Re-reading the folktale
By P. Mary Vidya Porselvi