Beauty cannot speak, but if she could,
She would say first, Do not harm me,
And then, Do my bidding. These two things
Which beauty asks, whether
In statue, or poetry, or song,
Are fair—or do we think ‘Do my bidding’ is wrong?
The free, desperate to never be enslaved,
Seeing in their souls the meaning of the second request,
Sabotage the whole thing
In the very beginning
By doing beauty harm.
Did you see what they did to those women?
My poem is not moving.
Nor can it sound the alarm.