White flowers on mustard yellow?
Fall must make her feel mellow.
She tugs at me, trying to tame me.
But the autumn wind makes me billow.
We’ve been friends a long time.
I was a tricky choice, she’d claim.
I’d felt strange first, but quickly,
A huge part of her I became.
You see, all I’d planned for me
Was to add a little whimsy
To her life—be nothing but a cloth
Harmless, light and flimsy.
But, I’m more than that, I’m weighty—
I cause ripples and rifts, she tells me.
Unwittingly and unwillingly,
I’ve put her in a grave quandary:
Stay on her head, and she loses
Her job, education and powers.
Slip off her head, and she is
Beaten and killed by her captors.
Sometimes it’s not so terrible.
At most I’m a benign symbol
Of otherness, of not fitting in,
Of a weird, seclusionist people.
Sometimes I make her a token
For equity, diversity and inclusion.
Just the world’s feeble attempt
To amend years of discrimination.
But I’m her superpower, she says.
The fabric that never frays.
The cape that is not on her shoulders,
But instead frames her face.
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