X/Why

by Mihku Paul

Midas, they say, was a great king of Phrygia.
Descended of a royal house, mythic,
lauded by the Greeks and Romans.

A legend born of history, he was a son of
Gordias, who founded the city of Gordium
How men love to immortalize their brief human span.

An idea can live forever, the Gordian knot,
path to war, rationale for violence and yet
the son’s legacy a golden touch.

The hand, heart in action, instrument of intellect
and passion, can hold weapon or welcome.
We can choose peril or peace.

Time moves, sometimes asynchronous,
often a scramble of compressed moments that
spread like translucent ripples from the cast stone of our existence.

Now millennial, this new age, gold is still coveted more
than the life that mined it.
Humans labor in pits, mud and stone, they hammer and dig.

Another MiDAS appears, in a different kind of palace.
Laboratories become hallowed ground, Science.
Miniaturized integrated DNA Analysis System.

How to find a woman or a man, at the strand itself.
Amelogenin sex typing commercially available now,
identity and labeling, this or that.

Alleles are not destiny, Amel X or Amel Y.
Inexplicable mutation, political, to espouse enslavement.
Females condemned once again to a lesser existence.

Who would not choose to stay alive longer,
devour this short chapter and feel everything?
Delight in the body we’ve been given that carries us through.

Your gene code, they say, is as unique as your palm.
Parentage a necessary element to know what you need in your lifetime,
yet half of mine is unfathomable; unknown, unavailable.

Better a mystery than the genetic conclusion, inescapable violence.
I know who I am; a woman, like other women, with
the right to be equal, to be heard, to be loved