Feminist Poem by Bhanu Padmo

Drooping eyes were to drip;
I never knew, aha! silly me;
In fervor that I had mistaken for love.

To reminders of drooping suns
Silly tear-drops only I shed;
Utterly wrong I found my sapience soon.

For, I understood not this human affair really,
Its arcane secret,
Its locus so awry;
Irrespective of its ease to avail;
Its maddening glamour,
And ensuing glee prolific.

I knew not why so often
Drooping eyes were to drip.

Yet I wasn*t cured of the contagion,
Ancient and still on the prowl;
Conceit, they said,
Unchastened and wild;
Like virus it infects a solvent mind,
Obscuring answers, easiest and best.

Contagious I turned,
Spreading blindness about fervid love;
Evading its metaphysics all the time;
As if human thinking was never an alternative;
As if hard injunctions indeed could only redeem,
Really and readily in lieu.

Contagious I turned,
Spreading recommendations of freedom;
Nascent and undefined,
Blind like the egg,
Yet to acquire a form to see.

Contagious I turned,
Oblivious of equality of eggs;
Be it implicit freedom I stumbled upon,
Or implicit bondage the unlucky ones had fallen into;
The ones whose eyes drooped to drip.

Contagious I turned,
As mutual alternatives I made out of the two;
The unspelt freedom and abject bondage.

Quite unwittingly I did it though,
Evading metaphysics of fervid love;
As if human thinking was never an alternative;
As if hard injunctions indeed could only redeem,
Really and readily in lieu.

For once differently I responded
To a drooping sun winking a cue;
With tearless countenance,
With a thinking mind.

Emotionalism I quit, intellect I chose;
Refraining from wild invocation of freedom,
Unspelt and unknown;
To break into the home of kindred doctrines
Of love, of gender, of womb
And of self-incarnation,
Of survival and of evolution,
Of bivalent reproduction at womb singular,
Of blood-engineering
And of cosmic purpose.

At sundown on that fateful eve
I stood before the mirror,
Secular and wide;
Wiping off exhaled dew
That obscured own image.

I beheld therein the feminist,
With words of gender equity written on her lips;
Gender equality wasn*t the vogue any longer;
Barren simplism she had quit,
In favor of fertile sophistication;
Sophistication that metaphysics begot;
Metaphysics of fervid love.

Never again thenceforth
Drooping eyes would drip;
For, never again thenceforth
Arbitrary fervor would pass for love.