Wangechi Mutu, Forbidden Fruit picker, 2015. Collage painting. 39 1/2 x 58 5/8 inches (100.3 x 148.9 cm). Copyright Wangechi Mutu. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.
There are those who, predictably, hate the woman state.
Envy fevers the face. How they’re dying to taste the woman state.
The journey is always brief. Low winter hills. The sky red
As wrung flesh. Bonechill. Still, I celebrate the woman state.
The earth: silent, pliant, lush. The young grass asway in wind.
Waters gushing to fill any lack. Mankind taints the woman state.
Those thin mothers, infants slung to a hip, graceful in any space?
The sight of them incites in me a silent rage. The woman state:
Is it a myth, a bait & switch, a gift with no receipt? And yet—
I was like them once. A guest, not an inmate, of the woman state.
Freedom isn’t free, men say, fingering fresh jangling chains.
The itch, the ache in the crotch as they berate the woman state.
By boat, by foot, by tunnel, by air, by will, by lie, by prayer, by luck:
We have come. We are here by the hand of fate. The woman state
Is what we set out from and journey toward, begging knowledge
And grace. Let us welcome—let us praise—the woman state.
What drives the opposition? Green bills. A bottomless gut.
It’s late in the age of man. Muscle hates the woman state.
Not laws, nor hammers, nor gold, nor lust, nor petrol, nor GIFs, nor sons:
With none of these should we seek to create the woman state.
