(On seeing: “Pelican Daycare - six weeks to five years”)

 

If you can watch the life in you expanding, to land upon this sphere scarce half complete

If just a few weeks later you are ousting that unconsulted mite on Childcare Street

If you can strain your heart and mind and sinew, to earn a sum scarce meeting with the bill

Suppress the tearing, screaming pain within you, and look to Mammon’s needs, you must fulfil

If you can turn your back on Mother Nature, spurning her archetypal guiding hand

Suppressing every tendency to nurture, the stronger call: “Industry must be manned”

If you can don the suit - the BMW - and roar away to where the future lies

And outperform the male who once would love you (executives avoid emotion’s ties)

 

If you can put the looking glass behind you, and beat upon the ceiling’s glass above

Undo the female chains that surely bind you, to wield a hammer in a rawhide glove

If you attend the gym and pump cold iron, to better bash constraint where e’er it looms

And take up martial art you can rely on, that every male protector, mocks - and dooms

If you can drink while it’s not yet your master, waking next morning focused in your aim

To race to CEO – faster and faster: a woman’s ultimate achievement claim.

If you’ve no truck with crowds that have no virtue – demand that those around you ape your drive

Rat Race embrace - ambition cannot hurt you; the journey’s not the thing - but to arrive.

 

If you avoid the unforgiving minute: the gap left in between endeavours slabs

Step carefully, making sure not to slip in it, where truth of what’s been lost, sneakily grabs

If you can stay aloof from mums with babies, declaring yours ‘attended properly’

Thrust from your mind the might have’s and the maybes; the difference between blood - and property

If you can drive a business up the ratings, and never for a woman’s winnings pine

Being content that you’re no longer dating; cold figuring now shapes your bottom line.

If all you have at bed-time is a CD, a cold disinterested plastic disc

Where once life had a frisson, slightly seedy, with letters set against a sense of risk.

 

If here and there your lad can have a father, and know the gift of time termed “quality”

And no one stops to ponder would she rather have had a say in this modernity?

If school results confirm he is a credit to cash well spent on rearing skills applied

and if she felt ill-served – she never said it; look how the Oyster door is open wide!

And should this be the template for the future, and should man’s goals and prizes win the day

No child shall know, again, a mother’s nurture; all to the good – soft hands don’t suit today!

With Mothering diminished to a token; Perversity’s work here is surely done.

Your soul denied; The Feminine quite broken, and, which is more, you’ll be “a Man” – as one.