Dear Daddy,
You’ve been protecting me from the day you knew I existed.
You’ve rushed by mother’s side when her stomach was ******.
Apparently you and mother smiled so much,
When my eyes repeatedly scrunched.

I’m 12 now daddy, and being a girl is hard.
I always get teased for wanting to play footy.
“It’s a boy’s sport,” they say. Have a boy card.
It never meant anything but it really should.

I’m 14 now daddy, and I got called a **** today.
Of course I shrugged it off as a joke.
I was wearing jeans and never done anything with a boy.
You would’ve yelled at them; wouldn’t you say?

The funny thing is daddy,
you might’ve called a girl a **** at school.
Not of harm maybe, but isn’t it harmful?
You want to protect your daughter; I know you do.

Here’s the thing though daddy.
Maybe if boys learnt from when they’re young,
From their own daddy,
That teasing and leaving out girls
of a game of footy,
Pulling out the boys only card,
Or calling them a ****
A *****
hurts.
Maybe being born as a girl wouldn’t be as hard.

The world had magic, once
But we drove it out
With our hate and our sorrow
And our pollution
And our new age machines
With our war and our strife
And our forgetting
Most of all, the forgetting

We forgot the hum of the earth
And the song of the wind
We forgot the language of trees
And the comfort of soil
We forgot to be kind to the world
And that drove out the magic
That kept us whole, and good

We are left now with rubble
And a grey, polluted sky
The trees do not whisper to us
Since we started cutting them down
The earth doesn't hum
With our oil swords plunged deep

We have forgotten our roots
And they, have so, forgotten us.