I read an essay about women in the workplace by Virginia Woolfe earlier, and I wrote a poem about it:
I stare at a blank page
Imagination fills the blank void of my mind
Imagination, without which, I would be nothing
An empty shell.
Nothing clouds my vision
Nothing stops my imagination
No thoughts are polluted with the question of how men would react:
‘Is it too extreme?’
My thought processes are not stunted by the mark of patriarchal control,
By the view of what a woman should think
I have no Angel in the House
No voice in the back of my mind
Telling me to be gentle, pure, soft
Telling me not to ever let anyone guess that I have a mind of my own,
My thoughts, my writing, is raw, uncensored emotion.
For I do not care what others think of my thoughts,
Only what they think of my writing.
And I thank my predecessors, as she thanked hers,
Hers allowed her to kill her Angel,
Mine made it so my Angel was never brought into existence.
Hers allowed her to understand and challenge the patriarchy
That went as far as to pollute her thoughts,
Her thought of what a woman should think,
Dictated by men.
But mine have made it so that I do not have to.
I have no underlying prejudices,
No thoughts of what a woman should think
Nothing that I think is censored, no thoughts shock me
As they did her.
And I pity all the women in the world
Where this is coming back,
Where freedom is becoming more constricted,
The patriarchy more blindly accepted.
I just hope that they, like her, can kill their Angels,
Can recognise and challenge the difficulties that they face,
And can learn to write with no regard for what a man would think,
What would seem scandalous.
Even if I face criticism, I do not care
Criticism should be criticism for quality of writing, not content,
After all, in the words of Oscar Wilde,
‘There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book.
Books are either well written, or badly written. That is all.’
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