'I see her plunge ...'

From 'Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law' by Adrienne Rich, for International Women's Day. Trying to decide what I was going to blip for this important day, I thought first of women's history and writers of the past who have inspired me, but then I realised that what the day should really be about is the future, and anyway I did a historical blip for this day last year. This poem was written over forty years ago, but it is about the future for women and makes me think of those Egyptian women in Tahrir Square a few weeks ago, demonstrating for their future and that of their country, breaking away from Islamic and western conventions to do so, and of my daughter and her friends, making lives of their own, with men but on their own terms, working towards the ideals that I've held all my life.

I can't remember becoming a feminist, I seem to have been one all my life, but Adrienne Rich was the first feminist poet to inspire me when I discovered her work about twenty years ago. The poem ends with these hopeful stanzas:

Well,
she's long about her coming, who must be
more merciless to herself than history.
Her mind full to the wind, I see her plunge
breasted and glancing through the currents,
taking the light upon her
at least as beautiful as any boy
or helicopter,
poised, still coming,
her fine blades making the air wince

but her cargo
no promise then:
delivered
palpable
ours.

The use of 'helicopter' here may sound strange, but it is a reference to a passage in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex.