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© 2013 Darryl Knowles Born and raised on Vancouver island BC, Darryl Knowles has been writing poems and songs since Dick and Jane saw Spot run...   "All the Best" is forthcoming in Beautiful Women: an anthology (Lipstick 2013).

All the Best

You’re Mae West and all the best rolled into one,
Frida Kahlo, Sally Ride, Sappho, and Jong,
Goldie Hawn, Mary Read, Annie Oakley, too,
Rosa Parks, Joan of Ark. Sparks fly from you.

You’re Sister Morphine, Thelma and Louise,
Grace Slick, the Dixie Chicks, every fairytale bitch.
You’re Bewitched, Mary Kay with pink Cadillacs,
Cat Ballou, Fay Wray, Rivers, and Plath,
Bonnie Parker, Helen Keller, Pearl S. Buck,
all the women in this world
who ever gave a fuck
(never gave up.)

You’re unsung heroes everywhere who hold up half the sky,
you’re hard as shell and soft as steel, who’ll look me in the eye,
every take-no-shit bitch that has ever been,
a mother’s mother’s mother’s mom,
a lover and a friend, 
scarlet lettered and unfettered, raw to the bone
—Hepburn, Delilah, Fonda, and Peron.

You’re Eve and you’re Adam, of that I am sure.
We know that without you
no one would be here,
no one would be here,
no one would be here,
no one would be here.

 

          

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