When You, If I
by Annaliese Herrera
Young Women’s Leadership Academy
Annaliese Herrera is the president of her high school's Young Poets Society and will attend Washington University in St. Louis to continue her educational journey. With a passion for uplifting women, her poem challenges F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous quote: “She was beautiful, but not like those girls in magazines”
When she is beautiful like the women in magazines
What, then, will you say?
That dignity is confined within
Never, for a creature on display.
When she is beautiful for the way she thinks
Will you make her thoughts unjustified?
That brains cannot be met with beauty
Fearing that a woman’s powers collide.
When she speaks ever so passionately
Will you subdue the twinkle in her eye?
To claim what once belonged to her,
And that of a million other lives.
When she cannot smile through discomfort
Will you resent her absent ease?
That she no longer accepts the woman
you’ve been forced to exist by a singular means.
If I define what is and is not for me
Will I then live like a woman?
To laugh and cry
To engineer and create
To fashion a life, our design
Where freedom is innate.
