Women’s Day

”I was still suck­ing my thumb
the first time I sang we shall overcome’
it was a numb Decem­ber night, it was a small town fable
my first cor­por­ate vil­lain and my mother was the hero
all Gins­burg tra­di­tion, howl­ing human rights for workers!’
I asked her,
“Why are we so mad?”
And she parked her head down in the freez­ing rain and saw me
So ser­i­ous and small with my big Mack Truck union sign
She smiled to herself,
pondered polit­ics of fin­gers curled,
“This is solid­ar­ity,” she whispered to her baby girl.” — Alix Olson

Today’s rally was dis­ap­point­ing to say the least. Turnout: pathetic. Union organ­iser types doing union speeches and hardly anyone talk­ing about domestic viol­ence or abor­tion rights… and lots of people talk­ing about indus­trial rela­tions and the stolen­wealth games. Why does this annoy me? Because no one ever talks about women’s issues at indus­trial rela­tions ral­lies. Mean­while a group of filipino women hold up their plac­ards: ‘stop traf­fick­ing in women’… and seem quite con­fused about the speeches.

Alix Olson ends her poem with a trib­ute to the women before me and calls out Audre Lorde, Ger­maine Greer, my mother, my grand­mother, and you and you… invit­ing the audi­ence to call out their names. Last time I called out Emma Gold­man and Rosa Parks and Eleanor Roosevelt. I want to make a dif­fer­ence. One day, I want to be one of those names. No prob­lem with aiming high, is there?