Trickle up (August 2012)

  

I don’t recall exactly when she posted this poem. My best guess is August. I barely had time to hand copy the poem into my notebooks (the way I do all of her poems) before she yanked it down from the site. Somewhere, I have a screen shot of it.

This is one of those few times she lets the curtain fall and a poem emerges to reveal the person behind the poetic persona.

The poem seems to be about attaining power and status by women in a male dominated society where power tends to trickle down all so aggravatingly slowly from the top, and women, if they are to get their fair share, must reach up and grab it for themselves.

To survive in a male dominated society, some feminists contend women must use whatever tools they have, including their sexuality.

The poem’s use of “we” rather than “I” supports this idea, emphasizing a sisterhood in the midst of an unfair social struggle and the desperate scramble it takes to claw to the top of the power pyramid, when society is dead set against them.

This poem says society’s trickle down has turns her (them) “into this thing that, frankly, is not what we dreamed we’d be.”

To counter this prejudice, they meet the challenge with an upsurge, “Frank and Un-adult-erated.”

The dividing up of the word unadulterated to emphasize the word “adult,” suggests the sexual element and the feminist ideology that women cannot play fair in a society where old boys networks that rest on top of the ladder of power keep women down.

The full word “unadulterated” concludes the phrase of meeting this challenge with an upsurge frank and unadulterated.

The word unadulterated has defiant meaning, of compete and absolute.

The poem, however, seems to be a kind of wink and a nod by a poet trying to convey a message explaining something she might otherwise deny, a coded and careful explanation she won’t likely admit to later if confronted, ending with the single question: “See?” meaning, now do you understand.

The short poem has two stanzas, the first explaining the problem, the second laying out what she (they) had to do about it.

The first part basically claims the unfair rules of society have forced her (they) into becoming something she (they) never imagined become.

But once challenged (the second stanza contends), she (they) took it one with an upsurge, frank and unequitable – the last line asking the reader “Do you get it?”

The fact that she removed the poem as quickly as she did suggests she had second thoughts, thinking maybe she may have revealed too much.

But the poem like its message is refreshingly frank and honest.

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