Someday, historians and archaeologists will collect data, develop theories, try to understand how it was that we could know what we were doing — to our planet, to each other — and go on doing it. Our best hope now is that those scholars and scientists might be human.(more…)
Because they might not.
They will ask what happened, and how. How could knowledgeable, educated people destroy themselves like this? Why did they continue in practices that their own studies showed were certain to destroy what they needed to survive?
Such intelligent, sophisticated beings. They (we) had great cities, universities, art and music, mathematics, technology. Democracy. And they gave it all away.
Living in it, now, I have thought these thoughts myself, as one of those lost citizens. I see that we have gone crazy. I see us blame each other and escalate the destruction.
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Three a.m. perseveration & a poem at the end of the world
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Summer Solstice
Summer Solstice. Digital Collage by sb. Full credits at flickr. Summer Solstice, Sitka, 1993
This day blooms
under wide meadows
of sky. We lay
our sun-stunned bodies
in constellations
of clover and buttercups.Salmonberry bubbles
of sweet red light
break on our tongues.
Shooting stars
in the flowerbeds,
pollen in our sheets.
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Gender: Tradition!
ALICE in the 02020’s. Digital collage by sb. Full credits at flickr. Opponents insist that same-sex marriage is a threat to “traditional” marriage. They are right.
But the threat isn’t about marriage. It’s about gender and its strict rules. It’s about girl/boy. It’s about man/woman. It’s about husband/wife. It is about, if they can bend the rules . . .
When a man and woman marry, he is not required to be husband and she is not required to be wife?
This is scary. This is a bit too much freedom of choice. This is, what do you mean we can make our own rules? This is, how do I know what to do? How do I know who to be?
That ground is too shaky. It could open up and swallow us. Let’s go back to solid ground. Let’s go back to where I know what to do, where I know who to be.
Let’s stop changing things.
We had just begun to accept that men could love men and women could love women, but now you want us to accept that man and woman are flexible things?
This is a world too far.
Next you will insist that there are more than two genders.
This is the fourth in a series about gender. The others are:
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Snapshot Poem 17 June 02026
Another restless night.
Persevere is a virtuous word.
Perseveration is not.
Grief is a stone in the gut.
It does not rest.
~sb -
Drag
the sum is greater than the parts. Digital collage by sb. Full credits at flickr. Drag was, in my lifetime, acceptable. Men were allowed to pretend to be women, for entertainment. Men’s organizations played with it often, even ritually. Old photos appear now on the internet of famous men (J.D. Vance for instance) coyly posing in makeup and wigs.
Of course there was the gay version, sort of underground, sort of private, sort of not for straight viewing. We were allowed to nod at this behavior as long as it was play, but not, as it sometimes is now, gender fluidity.
I was in my twenties when I realized that I, too, dressed in drag. Let me be clear, I was fine being female, never wanted to be a boy, was not even a tomboy. Though I did covet some of the boy privileges I was beginning to recognize.
But, all that dressing! The makeup, the short skirts, the high heels, the stockings, the done hair. It was work. It was expensive. It was not, physically, comfortable. I know now that I pulled it off, but I did not know that then. One can never be pretty enough.
And with gender — my gender — came other expectations. Marriage, motherhood, sweetness, compliance. These I failed at. These I never wanted, and even if I did, I hadn’t the talent. Boys, of course, had their own demands, on themselves, and on us.
This is the third of a series on Gender. The others are:
Gender: Ambiguity
Gender: Anatomical?
Gender: Tradition!
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