Poem: "Sisters, Brothers, Soldiers"

[ysabetwordsmith]

This poem came out of the November 6, 2012 Poetry Fishbowl.  It was inspired by minor_architect and thesilentpoet.  It has been sponsored by Anthony & Shirley Barrette.  You can read about Huā Mùlán, Joan of Arc, Deborah Sampson, Dorothy Lawrence, and other wartime cross-dressers online.

Sisters, Brothers, Soldiers

Huā Mùlán answered the call to arms
in place of her aged father.
It is said that she served twelve years with honor,
that she saved China from the Huns,
that she inspired the first poems in Chinese history
to support the notion of gender equality.
Spilling down the shelves of literature forevermore
are her poems and her plays,
her operas and her movies,
speaking to all those whose reflections show
someone they don't know.

Everyone knew Jeanne d'Arc
was born a woman,
yet she dressed as a man
and men followed her into battle.
Say that she was mad, or queer,
or possessed by the Devil;
or say that God saw the shape of her soul
and bade her put on the clothes of a soldier.
History records her victories even so.

Deborah Sampson was
the first known American woman
to impersonate a man
in order to join the army
and take part in combat.
She enlisted as Robert Shurtleff,
treated her own wounds to avoid discovery,
then eventually fell to fever
and was discovered to be female in form.
She was honorably discharged,
and the state of Massachusetts
honorably discharged its debt with her pension.

Dorothy Lawrence was an English reporter
who secretly posed as a man
to become a soldier in World War I.
She served as Private Denis Smith
and bicycled to the Somme.
Later she turned herself in
for fear of endangering her brother soldiers, and
was arrested for slipping through the army's security.
Her experiences were censored, buried
under the midden-heap of history, but
like all such mounds it disgorged the truth with time.

No one knows how many there have been
throughout the ages, only that
it has happened over and over again --
and for every discovery come to light,
surely there must remain others never discovered,
or whose secrets were kept by those who saw.
No one knows how many times
the fate of the future
has turned on a pin of their pulling.
They are uncounted, but never discounted.

Their influence is hidden
from the fiery eye of fame,
little more than a hint in history,
but still it whispers:
You are wo/man.
You are warrior.
Let nothing stop you.

There have always been those
who were discontent to remain behind as
mothers, daughters, wives --
those who took up arms as
sisters, brothers, soldiers --
who marched to manhood
by a strange and foreign way

yet arrived, all the same, at that end.

Comments

[e-scapism101.livejournal.com]

I love these stories. Have you read Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment?

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

>>I love these stories.<<

Yay!

>>Have you read Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment?<<

I don't think so; he's hit or miss for me.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

Here I go about the Benjamin January books again. The very first one, A Free Man of Color, has a subplot relevant to this. More I will not say for fear of spoilers.