PINKY

Today the world was awash in pink; men in baby pink, babies in old pink, everyone was pinked up for the occasion and I wasn't even looking at all these glimmer through rose colored glasses, aha. Of course I, too, was part of the hype. I had a pink tie with my suit, and a pink Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation pin on my lapel, and people in Church - a few of them at least - thought I was cute. I blushed and further added up my representations.

There was no need for memo on this, let me say for the record. Mother's Day, somehow, had come to find it's capitalist bearing in this color which, in all irony now that I remember, my college classmate told me is the traditional color of communism. Pink.

But historically, pink is feminine, too, although I must say all references of feminine are not just of, and for, the female kind. To tell a man of integral manly disposition to find his inner female is to emphasize his masculinity, and in this respect pink has become - especially on this day - a unifying color.

This mother, that breast cancer. How else can we better celebrate this day today by realigning with pink in our effort to show how we have better understood the struggles of women in their inherent responsibility of bringing life? Wearing pink is the least of what we can do, but almost always, that littlest step is the initial move towards the longest leap.

And so at this juncture, as I commend on my mother and all the mothers I know and do not, let me share another pink in the form of a poem by a woman whose poetry about women is worth the value all womanhood may have contributed to the language. This poem may shock you, or amaze you, or even encourage you into doing something you have never done before (like writing poetry), but the real deal is that its poet, University of Virginia professor and former US Laureate Rita Dove, had shown me in all her African-American nobility that in this world, in this age, whatever color covers our skin, whatever race claims our ethnicity, whatever canon occupies our politics, and whatever sex regulates our identity, in the eyes of the one beholder, we are nothing but equals.

To you, Ms. Rita Dove, a very Happy Mothers Day.

And to you, my reading friends, here is that poem...


After Reading Mickey In The Night Kitchen For The Third Time Before Bed
I'm in the milk and the milk's in me!... I'm Mickey!

by: Rita Dove

My daughter spreads her legs
to find her vagina:
hairless, this mistaken
bit of nomenclature
is what a stranger cannot touch
without her yelling. She demands
to see mine and momentarily
we're a lopsided star
among the spilled toys,
my prodigious scallops
exposed to her neat cameo.
And yet the same glazed
tunnel, layered sequences.
She is three; that makes this
innocent. We're pink!
she shrieks, and bounds off.

Every month she wants
to know where it hurts
and what the wrinkled string means
between my legs. This is good blood
I say, but that's wrong, too.
How to tell her that it's what makes us --
black mother, cream child.
That we're in the pink
and the pink's in us.