When I was a girl, I watched the 1982 movie "The Last Unicorn" with my sister in the early 2000s. My sister and I sat on the beige living room carpet. Growing up, beige carpets and white walls were expected in apartments. On the TV, soft rock flows beneath the animated picture. An ethereal unicorn stood poised before the blue sky and hills. The fairy tale painted the white and beige real world. I loved that movie despite preferring pegasuses over unicorns, and wished to craft my own fairy tales. Fairy tales where the beautiful heroine possesses brown skin, brown eyes, and coiled ebony hair. A childish wish, a thoughtful adult could make true. As an adult, I've thought fairy tales through, and it's not just enough for the beautiful heroine to inspire brown and black girls like I was. I've read The Last Unicorn novel a decade past adolescence. The film is a dream swaying to soft rock on the black sea of memory. The Last Unicorn was aware of its fairy tale nature, like an adult reopening the fairy tale book with a cracked spine. Familiar but new to wiser eyes. The unicorn leads the way for me to write a fairy tale not for the girl I was, but for the woman I've become.
Swimming side by side in unison among red coral,
Entwining occasionally in their colourful pre-dawn dance,
A pair of small creatures resembling
Horses of the sea
Or perhaps Pegasuses - with pectoral fins
Rapidly fluttering like hummingbird wings -
Swirl and sometimes touch snouts, as if kissing.
Ending their ritual, the female
Spirals up out of seagrass, leaving her mate impregnated.
May 5, 2018
The winds of change, they always come along.
We get to feeling safe and lose our fear.
And then as if from nowhere, blowing strong,
stampeding Pegasuses, they appear!
They tear through sky; they trample all we know.
The winds of change - they always come along.
We welcome them, but are they friend or foe?
Is "progress" mostly right or mostly wrong?
We let them take us, for we are a throng
of humankind, prepared for a new day.
The winds of change - they always come along.
But will technology blow us away?
We change with them and think that all is good
because they start to lull us with a song
that promises some peace and brotherhood.
The winds of change - they always come along.
Sept. 1, 2017 for Julie Rodeheaver's Winds of Change Poetry Contest
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