For Dolores

Content notice: This poem includes descriptions of sexual harassment and makes references to sexual assault and abuse. If you choose to share this poem on social media please include a content notice with your post.

 

For Dolores

The thing they don’t tell you about
Becoming A Woman
Is that you will experience The Worst Of It
Before you are one

While you are still a child
Just getting used to wearing a bra
You will be initiated
Into The World Of Men

While you hardly understand
How you are changing
The world will have changed
Around you

There will be the man who stares at you
For a whole train journey
While you pretend not to notice
Too scared to get up and change seats

There will be the man who approaches you on a crowded street
And offers you his hand and when you take it
He will wriggle his finger in your palm
Just a little secret between the two of you

There will be the neighbour who chats to you in the street
And invites you to his house for some chocolate
And you will politely decline
And worry about him knowing where you live

There will be the man who stares at you on the platform
And when you get on he will follow you
And when you change into a different line he will follow you again
And you will feel so alone in this crowd of commuters

And you will not tell anyone about this man
Or any of the others
You will not tell anyone, not because you think you would not be believed
But because you know that you would be

You know that Those Who Love You will be so upset
And you will think that you cannot handle their pain
Of not being able
To protect you

And what is the point
Of making them so upset
If there is nothing they can do
To protect you

And you also know
That if you tell someone
This will all become real
And you don’t want it to be

So it’s easier just to stay quiet
And even now, 20 years later
You wonder if it wouldn’t be better to stay quiet
And not write this poem

Because what is the point
Of bringing this up now
Of opening old wounds
That were almost healed

 

What they do tell you about
Becoming A Woman
Is that It Gets Better
And in a way it does

Because nothing says prey
Like a teenage girl
Insecure in an ill-fitting body
With chipped nail polish, not trying to make eye contact

And while the harassment doesn’t stop
It will get less
And you may get better at it
And learn that it is not such a big deal

And you will come to consider yourself lucky
That nothing Really Bad
Ever happened to you
Because you know how much worse if could have been

And you will watch the 37th movie
In which a teenage girl seduces a middle aged man
And you will wonder if that is how they remember it
If they remember you at all

And you will feel for those fictitious girls
And the real ones who play them
And for yourself
And for the girl you were

Who kept silent for so long.

 

Grace Krause, Cardiff 8.4.2019

 

 

The picture at the top is a still Dominique Swain and Jeremy Irons in the 1997 film Lolita. Swain was 15 at the time of filming.

I would like thank John Krause for helping me find a title for this. I apologies for turning down his suggestion of “Once again a man told me what to call this poem”