I was a man once
in another life
I remember it fuzzily and distantly
I am sure I loved some things, some people
with all my heart in that taken-over way
and I confess I expressed it
reservedly and
often intellectually or mythically or
I referred to other things
like nature or God or the brotherhood of warriors,
when I meant
the love of a lover or child who was so personal to me
that I didn’t dare touch it directly
for fear of disintegration
I was a woman once, or twice, or thrice
who gave everything in her heart
to a man who left without a word,
or with hard-hitting words,
or saw her as deficient or as a hole
to be emptied into that could magically
absorb pain and shame, or
as a consciousness superior to his
to whom he could not be devoted
but only jealous of instead, or
as a free spirit he wanted to possess
but could only have if he let her go
and trusted her.
I have lived the pain of women
raped, beaten, abandoned, stalked, and killed
because they loved their own life
and couldn’t continue to sacrifice it
to appease men’s pain
women who were used and discarded,
who died in childbirth
who died alone, whether young or old
And I have lived the pain of men
beaten down by fathers, shaped unnaturally by mothers
men who couldn’t please women and lost them
men who yearned so deeply for the spiritual connection
women provide
men who achieved material success but lost their heart
men who had heart but lived as involuntary monks
men who felt pride in “having” many women
but who never knew them
men who died of suicide by heart attack, alcoholism, drugs,
righteousness, bitterness, reckless violence, loneliness,
success, or gun
Let us feel down and through these earthly stories
to the joys, blessings, and gifts of being: man and woman
to remember the sacred gifts of both
we have both in us
at every moment
we are bigger than both
we are the sacred marriage
and that is something greater than two
it is an experience
of the best
of both
loving the best of each other