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Empowerment, Part I

My name is Harold and I wed
the greatest woman in the world,
the problem here is not my wife,
rather her sister’s little girl.
My niece had hippie parents, see,
and public school taught her some things,
things that I think weren’t all that true,
based on the huge trouble they’d bring.

I noticed first, when she was young,
she wanted to play the male sports,
tried out for football at age ten,
they kept doing things of that sort,
her mother would say that a girl
should have the same choice as a boy,
I pointed out that young girls can,
but one fact they just can’t avoid
is that young girls remain smaller,
they be smashed around in football,
and most girls don’t want to play it,
it’s not in their interest at all.
How would she learn feminine ways,
how girls and women interact?
If spare time was spent with rough boys,
hoping her small bones didn’t crack?
My sister-and-law and my niece,
said I ‘don’t want women empowered!’
But when she was bruised and black-eyed
she looked nothing more than dour.

Later on, when she reached high school,
and emerged grown from puberty,
my niece entered the dating scene,
and troubling rumors came to me
from the mouths of the local parents,
some said that my niece ‘got around,’
to keep my daughter far from her
so that she did not ‘drag her down.’
I didn’t want to believe it,
but I had once been young myself,
and when my niece came to visit
the signs were all right there to tell.
The distant look there in her eyes,
and how she talked about ‘her needs,’
that sex should be ‘empowering,’
and other such feminist screeds.
Her mother would smile and nod,
and talk about how ‘times did change,’
but beneath all the false facades
I saw in my niece lasting pain.
My daughter said she had caught her
sobbing out in the girl’s bathroom,
and said few girls befriended her,
consigned her to a social doom,
yet still she’d act like she knew all,
and never did cease to speak up,
she claimed it was empowerment,
then cried from the life of a ****...

CONCLUDES IN PART II.

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