Cool Poem

Reveille
by Barbara Kingsolver

I am the woman whose flesh
does not move when she walks,
the bloodless, sweatless woman
who cries copious tears from the pressure
of all other prohibited secretions.
I am painted in the colors of no flower
that ever really bloomed,
I do not smell like any living thing.
I am the woman at war with body hair: who
curls her oriental hair,
straightens her African hair,
garnishes her eyelids with hair
and removes it from her eyebrows,
pursues it and relentlessly destroys it,
enganged in war with her mammalian origins.
Literally you have seen me a million times:
the radically altered female who doesn't stand out
in the crowd
of radically altered females
I remain because
the potential of my body is a universe.
If I should abandon the battle
and turn my pious fury on something
less persistent, more conqureable than my sex,
if I should go away to war
and leave my fields behind, unmowed,
unmanicured, and let the weeds spring up,
iif I were to become
the animal that I am, then
what?