Reprieve

manhattan is an island
 like the women who are
 surrounded by children in a car
 surrounded by cars
 or manhattan was a project
 that projected the worst of mankind
 first one and then the other
 has made its mark on my mind
 it's sixty years later
 near the hypo-center of the a-bomb
 i'm in the middle of hiroshima
 watching a twisted old eucalyptus tree wave
 one of the very few lives that survived and lives on
 remembering the day it was suddenly
 thousands of degrees in the shade
 and what all of nature gave birth to
 terror took in a blinding ray
 with the kind of pain
 it would take cancer so many years just to say
 oh to grow up gagged and blindfolded
 a man's world in your little girl's head
 the voice of the great mother drowned out
 in the constant honking
 haunting the car crash up ahead
 oh to grow up hpynotized
 and then try to shake yourself awake
 cuz you can sense what has been lost
 cuz you can sense what is at stake
 yeah, so
 it took me a few years to catch on
 that those days i catch everyone's eye
 correspond with those nights of the month
 when the moon gleams like an egg in the sky
 and men are using a sense
 they don't even know they have
 just to watch me walk by
 and me, i'm supposed to be sensible
 leave my animal outside to cry
 but when all of nature conspires
 to make me her glorious whore
 it's cuz in my body i hold the secret recipe
 of precisely what life is for
 and the patriarchy that looks to shame me for it
 is the same one making war
 and i've said too much already
 but i'll tell you something more
 to split yourself in two
 is just the most radical thing you can do
 so girl if that shit ain't up to you
 then you simply are not free
 cuz from the sunlight on my hair
 to which eggs i grow to term
 to the expression that i wear
 all i really own is me
 yes to split yourself in two
 is just the most radical thing you can do
 goddess forbid that little atom
 should grow so jealous of eve
 and in the face of the great farce
 of the nuclear age
 feminism ain't about equality
 it's about reprieve