Pandora

From her comes all the race of womankind,
The deadly female race and tribe of wives
Who live with mortal men and bring them harm…
— Hesiod in Theogony
What is it about her?
Her first breath provokes slander,
then the slanderer accuses her of slander…
Scapegoating seems, by comparison,
an innocent affair.
So all the ills of men
originate from her?
Naturally, she will need to be
stoned and mutilated and confined and silenced
as often as possible …
till all the ills of women
seem to originate from him?
It is, to say the least,
a recipe for mutual paranoia.
She suggests — very tentatively, of course —
that there may have been
some misunderstanding … He agrees,
meaning something quite different.
What, then, can Pandora do
but step into the gulf between them
becoming wisdom-seeker, self-healer,
iconoclast, mythographer?
In one of her moods, mother wit
surrounds her like a halo of wasps;
in another, she draws into herself
the image of light radiating
from depthless water in a well …
She is the one who will not live
captive to another's fear, disgust.
She is maker and shaper,
dreamer and breaker,
and she is the one
who is holding the mirror.