OLIVIA MORGAN ON

Victoria Redel
​Bedecked

Tell me it’s wrong the scarlet nails my son sports or the toy
store rings he clusters four jewels to each finger.

He’s bedecked. I see the other mothers looking at the star
choker, the rhinestone strand he fastens over a sock.
Sometimes I help him find sparkle clip-ons when he says
sticker earrings look too fake.

Tell me I should teach him it’s wrong to love the glitter that a
boy’s only a boy who’d love a truck with a remote that revs,
battery slamming into corners or Hot Wheels loop-de-looping
off tracks into the tub.

Then tell me it’s fine - really - maybe even a good thing - a boy
who’s got some girl to him,
and I’m right for the days he wears a pink shirt on the seesaw in
the park.

Tell me what you need to tell me but keep far away from my son
who still loves a beautiful thing not for what it means -
this way or that - but for the way facets set off prisms and
prisms spin up everywhere
and from his own jeweled body he’s cast rainbows - made every
shining true color.

Now try to tell me - man or woman - your heart was ever once
that brave.
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Olivia Morgan has created, developed and led a series of innovative programs to center currently marginalized voices in US public policy and society. She is the Co-founder and Board Chair of the California Partners Project, an initiative led with California First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom to harness the state’s innovation and leadership for the advancement of gender equity and child wellbeing. Previously she established Common Sense Media’s Gender Equity is Common Sense initiative to understand and respond to the impact of media on children’s understanding of gender at every age. Olivia is honored to have served on the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities and guided its creation of the National Student Poets Program, under First Lady Michelle Obama’s leadership. She currently serves on the boards of the San Francisco Day School and the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, and on the Education Advisory Council of the Academy of American Poets. A native of Washington, DC, she lives with her husband David and two children in San Francisco.
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