To Be a Woman

Posted on July 29, 2015 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by Leslye Joy Allen

“Green and Purple”
Copyright © by Leslye Joy Allen. All Rights Reserved.

To be a woman means you can admit that you are afraid

when you really are afraid.

You can admit that some things

cannot be fixed by you and you never lose face

or your womanhood because womanhood itself

defies the definition placed on it by others.

A woman can always say she is vulnerable and then

end up being twice as pliant and twice

as durable as she was before she

admitted to anyone that she was prone,

precisely

because she knows that an unacknowledged

liability is not a symptom of a lack of will

or a lack of courage.

She knows it is not

all about her.

To be a woman is to know that

a disclosed weakness is

that visible wound healed only by

exposure to light and air,

and the first real step toward

unburdening and freedom,

and that inescapable revelation that

all flowers die, but

can bloom again.

This Blog was written by Leslye Joy Allen and is protected by U. S. Copyright Law and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Any partial or total reference to this blog or any total or partial excerpt of this blog must contain a direct reference to this hyperlink: http://leslyejoyallen.com with Leslye Joy Allen clearly and visibly stated as the author. All Rights Reserved.

Common Sense

Posted on November 20, 2014 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by Leslye Joy Allen

I am a Black woman, born and raised

in the American South, but I have

often had to yell or give long lectures

about my circumstances and my

problems and about what has happened to me

or other folk like me

and yelling and lecturing is a bore and a waste of my time, in spite

of the fact that I have met many of my Black folk that I love

and many White folk that I love and who love me,

but I have never seen any mass movement of White folk who

marched in the streets to say that they loved or supported Black women and

I have never seen any mass movement of Black people

who marched in the streets to say that they loved or supported Black women, so

I figured that in spite of that loving handful of

men and women who do or did love me, that

remain in my life or my memory, that I better

depend on myself because Common Sense demands that since I

am a Black American woman I better not make too many assumptions

about who I can count on

besides myself.

This Blog was written by Leslye Joy Allen and is protected by U. S. Copyright Law and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Any partial or total reference to this blog, or any total or partial excerpt of this blog must contain a direct reference to this hyperlink: http://leslyejoyallen.com with Leslye Joy Allen clearly and visibly stated as the author. All Rights Reserved.

Leslye Joy Allen

Social Commentary, History, Theatre, Jazz, and the Environment

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