Ralph Monday- A Poem

Through this Lens

Men never get it, through the beer, football

games, late night TV, the long ago lost

high school sweetheart—too late—the image of

women forever photoshopped as a caricature

imprinted on a bad piece of film.

What is it, this Big Bang origin of the male

perceived feminine?

fig-leaved Eve

damsel in distress

the knight with the pedestaled dame

Pre-Raphaelite romanticism

whore of Babylon

Victoria's angels

All overlays like the crusted, built up

surface of a Renaissance painting,

chiaroscuros so deeply shadowed

that the core of her is lost in the

testosteroned pigments

where only a woman can scrape away

the ragged surface and say

See

See

These are my colors

This my rose hips

There my raw sienna bones

Here my thoughts deep ultramarine 

I would share my secrets with you

my sisters too

if only you could truly know.


Ralph Monday is Associate Professor of English at Roane State Community College in Harriman, TN., and has published hundreds of poems in over 50 journals. A chapbook, All American Girl and Other Poems, was published in July 2014. A book Empty Houses and American Renditions was published May 2015 by Aldrich Press. A Kindle chapbook Narcissus the Sorcerer was published June 2015 by Odin Hill Press.