(What) If I Were a WOMAN?

This piece is not intended to be a poem (although I categorize it as my brand of prose poem); rather, it is a painful out-flow of reflective imaginings—questions and reasoning from a man’s poetic mindset that tries to imagine and empathetically enter the space of the multifaceted experience of those of the human species who are born female and embrace the femininity associated with it culturally—the indomitable, unfathomable, irrepressible, monumental equal half of the universe of all humanity we call WOMAN! The questions below do not capture the full range of experiences of every WOMAN; the reasoning includes those whose were assigned female at birth, as well as transgender individuals. Also, as Dr. Dalea Bean, my daughter, pointed out, this imaginative prose/poetic discourse does not adequately address the celebratory aspects, the positives, and the many joys of womanhood, including the happiness and pleasure of receiving and returning love from partners, family, and friends, the joy they experience from watching their child/children grow and take their place in the world, and the giving care that women provide. To every woman who has experienced the privileges and the signal honour, the blessing and the bane, the pleasures and pains of womanhood!