Venus Rising

Like Venus from the foam, they would say in that way only adolescent males could,

Full of poetry and hormones and gritty with grime and grandeur and the heat of their own longing.

They are men now, and men have a way of making it,

Of keeping to themselves all of their essence and not giving in to the pressures

Of life and society and age. Those men who were boys full up with false self-possession and heady shaky Confidence at a time when girls are filled with nothing but what everyone else expects them to be,

Insubstantial things like sugar and spice and glitter and she was Venus rising from the sea

Foam. I remember how we all looked at her with such anger, at the perfect fall of her hair and

The straightness of her teeth and the way her clothes lay against her skin. The dislike was amazing.

The aversion and the strength of our disgust was amazing. And she who was Venus, beautiful and

Ethereal and all the things that boys loved and could see, we coveted the curvature of her bones and

The gleam in her eyes. Maybe she was mean.

We didn’t really know her, us girls filled with awe and fear of who Venus was,

Us girls who took her at her face and never at her word, who saw Venus as Botticelli saw her, as

Alexandros saw her. A painting, a sculpture.

Maybe she was scared. We never heard.

You see, those boys wanted to possess that daughter of a god, and they filled her up with their wanting Until it shone from the sparkle in her eyes and crooned from the swinging of her hips, and

Those girls wanted to be Venus, that metaphor to perfection who always seemed to know how to speak

And look and be. They built her up until she was this smooth, stainless impenetrable creature.

Beautiful, haunting, silent.

Or maybe just quiet.

We never cared to get to know her.

You see we girls slowly became women who were filled up with our own experiences, heavy with

Them, heavy with life and brimming over with it and we flourished with it. We became solid messy Sticky things who had solid messy sticky opinions of our own. Beautiful Gaia titan women,

Of the earth, with hips that chanted and eyes that glinted.

Jagged.

Ragged.

Wounded.

Warrior women.

But goddesses are immortal. Set in stone, never learning and never growing, forever young.

And Venus stayed in stasis,

And the boys forgot about her and became men,

And the girls forgot about her and became women,

And Venus who had reveled in it, the admiration, and the fear, the lust and the jealousy—

Falling from grace is never a beautiful thing,

And we watched her fade into nothing,

Us boys and girls and men and women who filled her up with all of our feelings and then chipped them Away to fill up our own understandings.

She was in all her glory a cracked and hollow veneer and we had forgotten we filled her,

But oh, when Venus fell, we all felt the quiver of the waves

Bringing her home again. And remembered.