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.
The Next People
by Selina Li
There exists a world called the Garden of Eden
Of such dangerously beautiful edible flowers
Crimson, gold, and silver-like
Sharp-beaked birds
Fragile tigers and tamed lions
Mirroring infinite lakes and rivers
A perfect world
A white world
A world belonging to man and woman
A world belonging to a perfect white man and a perfect white woman
The perfect white woman belonging perfectly to the perfect white man
Adam and Eve
Lived in a universe void of pain and suffering
Until the taste of forbidden fruit
Tempted her and seduced him and
Then from within them
We came
Selina Li is a junior at the Winsor School in Boston. Her favorite hobbies include watching Korean drama, eating, and smashing the patriarchy.
