In memory of Gloria Steinem
(March 25, 1934–Sept. 2, 2026)

And in this so-called “post-truth world,”
I’m really pissed off—not at you, Gloria,

but your tenure on the planet has ended
when we need you more than ever.

That’s not your job anymore—you who never
passed the torch but lit the torches of others.

You certainly did more than your share,
you “lady journalist/rabble rouser,” you,

getting people all riled up about women
being equal to men, the notion of a “feminist”

a dirty word to some. Still. And to those
like me who feel that so much of what you

and other foremothers did for us has been
whittled away, you wrote that all is not lost:

“Your role as an older person is to remind us
how far we have come.”

And so I do, having never needed a man’s name
on my credit card, being able to own a home

by myself, too. By choosing to love whomever
I wish without being pigeonholed into marriage.

By making as much money as my male colleagues
and deciding whether—not when—I’d have children.

Oh, and keeping my last name even after I married,
a far less radical thing by the 1980s, thanks to

thousands like you who made the women’s
movement move. My pissed-off self still bristles

at those who refuse to accept the radical idea
that women are people, or, as you wrote,

“that people are people,” regardless of gender
or race or sexuality or class or ethnicity.

“Democracy starts with the ability of women
to make decisions over our own bodies,” you said.

“Unladylike, inappropriate, scandalous and incorrect”
you, whose words and actions have benefited everyone,

even now when it seems that the planet
is rotating in retrograde. It isn’t, you’d remind us.

Just look at the ways large and small we cannot see—
so many ways that the truth has set us free.

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