My Vagina Gets a Lifetime Achievement Award

A poem about unsung heroines

Look, I am not a poet.

I write poems, and some are okay, and one or two may even be good, but I am no Galway Kinnell. Here is his poem Saint Francis and the Sow, which you might want to read slowly and aloud, the way poems want you to touch them:

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

It’s one of the truly great poems I never tire of reading and re-reading.

I published my first collection of ‘poems,’ The Turning on my 50th birthday and have been working on a second collection since my mother died which I’ve called The Mother of Beauty, the title pulled from a Wallace Stevens quote: ‘Death is the mother of beauty.’

Not all of them are sad - grief can be surprisingly upbeat. Some are angry (climate change, human cruelty) and others are about swimming and God.

I’ve been extracting ones that just aren’t good enough to be included, which is like deciding which of your children are your favourites. It goes against all one’s instincts, but it’s the most important muscle you need as a writer: the ability to euthanize your own creations.

A collection also has to hold itself together, or congeal thematically. It must be a ‘story,’ with a coherent sensibility and take readers on an emotional journey. This can be tricky with anything that’s been written over long tracts of time and in different emotional states, because we keep changing, incrementally and we give our changes away in our writing.

It can be jarring if there are bumpy bits, by which I mean we have not held the entirety in our consciousness, but have just thrown a bunch of disparate pieces together and good luck making sense of that, dear reader. Anything that is presented as a whole must stand evenly. It’s this ‘smoothness’ that I’m after. I think all writers are, no matter the narrative form.

I haven’t been able to get an idea of where one of the poems fits. It’s a bit of fun (and also feminist) not two words you often find holding hands.

My Vagina Gets a Lifetime Achievement Award

At an intimate gathering

of her closest friends and past lovers

she accepted a lifetime achievement award

for four decades of hard labour

in the menstrual trenches;

thirty years as COO of irrigation and hospitality;

known by a few

as ticklish and affectionate

a wonderful kisser

a hostess of sit-down banquets

and quick snacks for the road

candid but kind

she never lied –

not even to placate;

harboured no prejudice

was patient with virgins and the fallen;

a humanitarian who spoke all languages

welcomed every form of prayer

asked only that visitors

whisper one holy word of worship;

in birth, conscripted herself for the frontlines

though willing, was never called to go into battle;

she remains the sacred grotto

of a billion buried generations

who came to die in her embrace;

though bloodied no more

she lives yet by the tides and the moon

and wants it known, it is too soon to retire –

time may have stilled her partying fire

but she could still eat a whole man for breakfast

if she wanted to.

So, yesterday, I made a decision. In writing terms, any decision is momentous and causes a run-on effect. For example deciding a piece is memoir rather than fiction, or changing points of view, or writing in the first rather than the third person are not minor adjustments. They steer the narrative in a particular direction.

I decided to separate the poems into two books. The Mother of Beauty will be about loss and God and the ocean, and the other, My Vagina Gets a Lifetime Achievement Award, will be a collection about the female body. The tone of each is just too different to try force them together, like opposing magnets.

The vagina, like the ‘bud’ in Galway Kinnel’s poem stands for endurance, survival and quiet, unsung heroines. Simply wondering about the world from the vagina’s point of view and all it’s been through, has been a good exercise, the kind that brings clarity.

I have poems about sex, marriage, sensuality, ageing, menopause and personal heroines, like Ettie Hillesum (a young Dutch writer who died in Auschwitz and whose diaries rival and exceed Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, but most people have never heard of her) and both my grandmothers, neither of whom finished school, but who understood what they needed to do, to survive.

I’ve opened comments to everyone. I’d love to hear who your unsung heroes are. And if you fancy writing a poem about them, please share it too.

Why am I here? I wonder about this all the time. Not just like, in this body, on this planet, but on Substack. I am a bit over all things digital and social media, but writing still makes some bizarre sense to me. I think Substack stops mindless scrolling, and let’s us pause together just for a moment and that feels holy enough for me to keep at it for now. If you’re getting value from being here, perhaps you’d like to buy me a coffee once a month and become a paid subscriber (though coffee in Sydney these days is more than $5 … I know, it’s mad).