Women squatting and sitting

with their butts on hot dirt in

Afghanistan wearing thick,

dark, scratchy cloth that

covers everything

but their eyes;

women working ungodly hours

in a squalid textile factory

in Bangladesh only to

be burned alive by the

thousands when the

factory catches fire;

women fighting for equal

pay with males for equal

work done from the

factory floor to the

executive suites

across America;

women protecting their

privates from duly but

dumbly elected legis-

lators who want ultra-

sounds up pregnant

women’s vaginas;

are men so threatened by

the “fairer” sex that they

have to do all that

indignity, humiliation,

subjugation and mis-

ogination to them;

are men so insecure and

so frightened by the

feminine mystique that

they must wrap women,

entrap women, slap

women down, down —

almost always in the

God-forsaken name of

their tribal, male “Father”

god to hide their fear

that the female can

castrate them,

in one way or another and cut

off their future and all their

future little legislators,

and maybe that’s what

women know and what

gives them patience?