At sea level there’s a wellspring of women

Their limbs and voices interlocked

arms and minds folded around contradictory philosophies

They burst forth from the Earth’s crust like lava

spitting and spreading and cleaning

the path in front of them

—

The higher you go, the more men you’ll find

hanging off high places by a hand

comparing sizes of various appendages

Scaling clouds like mountaintops

discovering new sights and conquering land

before dinner time

—

A cross section, an establishing shot

hints at where sexes will be found

at any given moment, on any given day

To pluck a woman from below

and put her in the sky seems

against / mother nature’s intentions

But women compare bodies too

and put feet up at the end of a day

exchanging their time for love

Push a man to the ground and watch

him listen at a whispering distance

to the conversations and find peace

The higher you go, the fewer women there are

so we’ve started plaiting ropes

that we’ll climb from the sea to the sky

————

“The higher you go, the fewer women there are.”

—Wangari Maathai, Kenyan Nobel Peace Laureate

Wangari Maathai is quoted as saying this in the TEDx Talk ‘We should all be feminists’ presented by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Coming from a female-dominated industry like publishing, I’m consistently surprised when I discover that many of the few men in the industry are in the top positions.