The poems contained in this series, “Liberating Words,” came out of an interdisciplinary course for high school juniors at The Winsor School, an all-girls school in Boston. 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 1960s and ’70s. 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.
Blonde Moments
By Isabel Macenka
When someone is foolish
Dull-witted and slow
When one loses her keys
And forgets how to spell
They call it a blonde moment.
(yes, blonde, not blond,
blonde,
the feminine form,
with an “e.”)
I am a blonde
A blonde with an “e”
I travel the world
And I speak some Chinese.
My life is blonde moments,
One after another
I have thousands each day
And hundreds each hour.
When I study physics
And hair falls in my face
When I summit a mountain
And stand in the breeze
I call it a blonde moment.
Get the Ms. Blog in your inbox! Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user Alex Naanou licensed under Creative Commons 2.0
Isabel Macenka is a junior at the Winsor School. She is a blonde, a dressage rider and an aspiring mathematician.
