from “The Lady of Civilization”
o
after Friedrich Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State
o
*
No house, I have
today
I have a far off reality
as do you
we were savage
before we were barbarian
anthropologists say
and economists
I can say
I have a memory
of an opening
of walking
into another epoch
but not a belief in it
this is called civilization
ask me
where I am
and I will
ask you for the answer
what have we done?
us but all of us
what could our love have been
if not born
from 18th-century enlightenment?
I could have been
a forest
a mother
among the Iroquois Senecas
a great clanswoman
before the herds
of horses
sheep and pigs
bred by the Euphrates
with milk and meat
rapidly men augment
and learn
a more advanced application
of work and property
men obtained food
and so the instruments
of work
the division of labor
our division of labor
being what it was
we worked so hard
didn’t we?
I believe we did
in our ways
but where
is the knowledge of this?
wealth increased
matriarchal law of inheritance
was overthrown
but we have no knowledge
of this either
the overthrow
of mother-right was the world
historical defeat
of the female sex
all things were changed
into commodity
the whole globe was taken
Vanessa Jimenez Gabb is the author of Images for Radical Politics, which was the Editor's Pick for the 2015 Rescue Press Black Box Poetry Prize, and is forthcoming in fall 2016. She also wrote the chapbooks midnight blue (Porkbelly Press, 2015) and Weekend Poems (dancing girl press, 2014). She is from and lives in Brooklyn.