| Thinking on the way that women are so often made to feel they are “lacking” something made me remember this poem from 2007. Beauty is not a perfect face, flawless skin or a perky body. Beauty is an eternal spirit and anyone who can’t love you for that doesn’t deserve you anyway. I’m just saying. Girls, you don’t have to beat yourself up. You have enough eternal value that you don’t have to give yourself away as if you are worthless. You don’t have to constantly belittle yourself because you don’t look like the plastic girls on the movies. I’ve been spending a lot of time singing to beautiful people in a home for the elderly and I’ve discovered that the most beautiful people rarely make the covers of magazines but they certainly never die in the memories of the lives they touch. You want to be beautiful? Learn to be unselfish. Learn to love and to forgive. Learn to laugh at yourself and others. Learn to dance in the rain and don’t be ashamed of a laugh line or two. The world tries to make you ashamed that you’ve lived long enough to gain an expression line or two. The proponents of the industry don’t care if you live or die. They just want you to feel insecure enough to keep feeding their multimillion dollar industry.
A WOMAN OF SUMMER *I wrote it under my nickname/pen-name Nochipa (first appeared on Pen Shells) Tell me what is more beautiful than strength of a life well-lived. My hands, lean and firm, are scarred by youthful poverty, while my sculpted arms, sinewy and brown, were chiseled by a farmer’s hoe,
and shapely, strong as trees grown from hill-treading. My wit is sharp as tobacco spears from traps of star-dream slayers while my heart beats steady for hundreds of children who listened to my song. So, now that you know I am not a T.V. woman-child, am I less lovely? |
