International Women’s Day 2022

Kangaroo Mother and Children
No to reflexive acceptance
of unacceptable patriarchal narratives
No to worship of colonial baubles
to pad hollow best lives
No to climate change
unless toward cooling
and they don’t have a plan
for our children’s children
all they give a f*ck about is bucks
over our f*cked dead bodies
and concocting plausible deniability
to shield them from deserved fates
their worst lives are realised only in ours
No to lies, to conjobs, to war except class war,
to whiteness, to empire, to the man on the screen
who sells it to us against our own interests –
does he think they’ll save their mouthpiece
after he’s served their purposes?
filling a hole with fluff satisfies hollowness
with the illusion of fullness
all those best lives are empty
tributes to emptiness
No to life without truth and the planet’s healing.

Jinjirrie, March 2022

Easter Bunny

Easter Monster Bunny

Shall I sample the ears of the Easter bunny first, or nibble at his legs?

Bite by bite, I will eat the body of the patriarchy,
absorb it, obliterate it, reclaim my destiny.

He won’t even squeal as I devour him,
and his violence, obscured by a smirking cuddly facade,
shall be ended.

The Lindt rabbit my husband gives me
has but a brief life and its sweetness nourishes my revolt.

Jinjirrie
April 2017

Symbolic Power Plays

Isenheim Altarpiece at Colmar - Niclaus of Haguenau and Matthias Grünewald 1512–1516Here’s another in the Unoriginal Patriarchy series, which commenced with Sol Invictus.

Take It To The Max

thorned on cross
cock no more crows
triumphant,
yet salutes her
mourning below.
while lambs vie,
coquetting with lions
on foreign barricades
medusa snakes writhe
disapproval
in mother’s grimace.

kill it, kill her now
recruit sisters,
initiate daughters
kill them too –
kill them all,
in bloodwash
this whiteness, this whiteness
eternal redemption,
supremacy,
damnation.

Jinjirrie, January 2016.

‘The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.’

– bell hooks, “The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love”, 2004

Sol Invictus

Talismans

at midsummer feast
he measures her bones
the incline of her neck
grey eyes like his own
and she in communion
surrenders her grip
he captures the pearls
that tumble and slip
purloined, coveted
he holds them fast
dons robe and talisman
nascent jewels past
at village harvest
her mother had worn
with oracle sisters
to bless the bright corn
Juno to Jezebel
Astarte to tart
prophecies broken
the land torn apart
his words command
over silver water
his sun, his moon
his property, his daughter.

Sylvia Posadas, June 2015

IWD 2015 in Asiotrailya

Rainbow Beach Despoiled

Gawdess save us from elitist wankers,
corporate executives and merchant bankers
boasting swimming pools and private schools,
swanking white saviours, all the right neighbours,
property profiteering, negative gearing,
life’s a long beach posing with boat and 4WD
for collaborators whose feminism screams
upward mobility in the patriarchal tree,
if you’re rich and white, the Grabbits don’t bite
no worries about wealth inequality,
in this lucky country of opportunity
they’ll spy on them but never on me,
pass the glass, celebrate the short history
of the brave settler women of Society.

March 2015

Related Links

All Feminists Are Created Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others

A History of International Women’s Day

International Women’s Day has a revolutionary history

“The idea that working class women have more in common with their boss because she is woman than with working class men is criminal and absurd. Gina Rinehart’s call today for a big dose of Thatcherism in Australia highlights that the essential contradiction in society today is not gender but class. Gender itself is a class construct.

The bourgeoisie and those women who have positions of power in bourgeois society celebrate the day precisely to paper over the class differences and to give the impression that becoming a boss is what liberation is about.”