Hope remains!

(Disclaimer: Ladies, women, womenfolk, and girls, I know that a man wrote the myth about Pandora, blaming women, as the writer of the Hebrew Bible also blamed a woman, Eve, for all the evils let loose in the world.  The story has, for the most part, been misinterpreted.  [Men put all that evil stuff in Pandora’s box].  What remained in Pandora’s box is Hope.  And women are our Hope to save humanity.)

My thought processes are complicated, maybe even convoluted, but I am never confused.

I am a writer.  I write, therefore, I am.  First and foremost, I am a poet.  I don’t know if all poets have a Muse, but there is something that inspires us, that sometimes tugs at our heart strings, but produces beautiful music.  Poetry is music that has its own orchestra.

This Women’s History Month I have felt like a Conductor of a great orchestra, of women.  The Conductor seems to lead the musicians, but it is the music that takes control.

One of my favorite pictures of my wife

I’ve been working on and thinking about a collection of poetry, Love Poetry is Lame, for a little more than a decade, inspired by My Muse, My Pandora, My Wife, Luisa Diaz.  In Love Poetry is Lame, there are two voices, one, the man who has given up on love, which has harmed him, and the other, who has been transported by love.

Those wise Greeks had five words for love.  Spanish, my wife’s first language, has two words for love.  English only has one word for love, perhaps because the English language is incapable of capturing the many faceted nature of love.

Most love stories are improbable.  (Read my review of Memoirs of a Prison Lawyer, Prison Wife, by Claudette Spencer-Nurse.)  This is a much longer story, how I found my love.  (Maybe another time?)

My wife is the first and only woman I have ever truly loved.  She is beautiful, she is kind, she is patient.  And I know you don’t earn your way into Heaven, but if one did, my wife would have a first class ticket to Heaven, for being a great mother of two girls.  (Mothers, you know what I’m talking about!)  Men were not given the gift of childbearing, because we are the weaker sex.  We couldn’t deal with the pain and the agony of giving birth, and of raising children, often alone.

I had planned this post to be my penultimate one this Women’s History Month, but I sensed my wife getting a little jealous at all the other women I was uplifting this Women’s History Month.  My sister Jeanette even called me and said I needed to uplift my wife.  Sista, that was already in the Plan!  “The best laid plans of mice and men. . .”

Notwithstanding my disclaimer at the beginning of this post, my wife is like Pandora.  If I gave her a box and told her not to open it, she would want to.  She would ask me if she could open the box.  So, open the box I give you.  Hope is not in this box, but my love, in all the languages that exist.

Te amo!