Inside Eve's womb
Family tree of the world
Lays her roots
Feeding branches of ebony and birch and redwood and oak.
Pushing up from dry soil of American hypocrisy,
Erected pines receive the pleasure of the sun
Blocking out daughters of slavery, mills, and Seneca Falls.

She bore slashes more than any man;
Bore children to every man.
Baked in heat rays
Sharing sweat with superior opposite sex,
Who never had to chew on roots
For aborting raped babies.
Only rebellion she had;
Only way to shield her human rights.
But dusty words of historians
Don't add her name next to Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Or Alice Paul.
Was their Rebellion greater?
Ain't she a Feminist?

Freedom from master legs
Did not liberate from ebony bark
Or 'V-ed' feminine braches.
Voices leafed through microphones,
Struggling to wrap their vines
Around sympathetic audiences.
Unheard through words or speech or acts,
Ebony faded into the background
Forgotten among Motts and Anothny.
Weren't they all speaking loudly?
Ain't she a Feminist?

She worked for independence
Or maybe it was running away from home
Before the marriage bells,
But living inside her sisters bodies
Working with shoot on her dress
For pay in negative numbers
Was not taken.
Is picketing not activism?
Were the protests not like
Outside a white house?
Ain't she a feminist?


Equality cries when stories of sisters are not told.
Seneca Falls, leading tree in the forest of feminism,
But not the mightiest
How dare you turn you're trunk against the need
For sunlight.