longer.blue

~ Gender divides us Echoed words from man made gods Like good and evil ~ Gender, as so many people live it, is not a wall but a landscape — something you move through, something that shifts with light and season, something far too alive to be pinned down by a word on a form or a box checked at birth. Yet the poem opens with division as a fait accompli. "Gender divides us." Not might divide, not sometimes divides — but does, plainly and continuously, in the present tense. The second line reaches for the source of that division and finds it somewhere old and inherited. Gods made by human hands, their words still echoing. There is something eerie in that image — the idea that voices from long-dead authorities are still shaping how we see ourselves and each other today, still drawing lines through the middle of experiences that were never truly binary to begin with. We did not choose these words. We were born into their echo. The closing comparison to good and evil lands with a kind of weary recognition. These are the great either/or constructions of human culture — the ones that promise simplicity and deliver, instead, a lifetime of things that don't quite fit either side. Most of us, in our most honest moments, know that we live somewhere in the in-between. Not good, not evil. Not one thing, not its opposite. The haiku does not offer a solution. It simply holds up the mirror and asks, gently, whether the lines we inherited were ever really there at all. ~ This observation was made with the assistance of claude.ai. ~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ To support me, visit: https://tinyurl.com/andy-rukes ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~