The poems in our ongoing “Liberating Words” series were written in an interdisciplinary course for high school juniors at The Winsor School, an all-girls school in Boston, Mass. The course, “The Personal Is Political: An Interdisciplinary Look at Feminism,” is co-taught by Libby Parsley, a History teacher, and Susanna Ryan, an English teacher. The second unit of the course focuses on the history and literature of second-wave feminism—the women’s liberation movement of the 1960’s and 70’s. Students read a compilation of poems by women writers from that period and then wrote their own poems; the assignment asked them to represent an issue or problem they see as central to 21st-century women’s experience through the very personal genre of poetry.
Hatred
by Lucie Kapner
I hate my hair.
Not the hair on my head,
that hair I have straightened into submission.
I hate my hair.
My hair down there.
The hair we don’t talk about.
I hate my hair.
I hate the way it pokes out
through my underwear.
Rough and unruly.
I hate my hair,
so I shaved it off.
And now I don’t have hair to hate.
Now I hate my legs.
Lucie Kapner is a junior at the Winsor School in Boston. She enjoys traveling and taking photos in her spare time.
