The Convention

FROM the Queen Bee mother, the mother Beast, and the mother Fowl in
the fen,
A call went up to the human world, to Woman, the mother of men.
The call said, ‘Come: for we, the dumb, are given speech for a day,
And the things we have thought for a thousand years we are going at
last to say.’

Much they marvelled, these women of earth, at the strange and curious
call,
And some of them laughed, and some of them sneered, but they answered
it one and all,
For they wanted to hear what never before was heard since the world
began—
The spoken word of Beast and Bird, and the message it held for Man.

‘A plea for shelter,’ the woman said, ‘or food in the wintry weathers,
Or a foolish request that we be dressed without their furs or
feathers.
We will do what we can for the poor dumb things, but they must be
sensible.’ Then
The meeting was called and a she-bear stood and voiced the thought of
the fen.

‘Now this is the message we give to you’ (it was thus the she-bear
spake):
‘You the creatures of homes and shrines, and we of the wold and brake,
We have no churches, we have no schools, and our minds you question
and doubt,
But we follow the laws which some Great Cause, alike for us all, laid
out.

‘We eat and we drink to live; we shun the things that poison and kill,
And we settle the problems of sex and birth by the law of the female
will,
For never was one of us known by a male, or made to mother its
kind,
Unless there went from our minds consent (or from what we call the
mind).

‘But you, the highest of all she-things, you gorge yourselves at your
feasts,
And you smoke and drink in a way we think would lower the standard of
beasts;
For a ring, a roof and a rag, you are bought by your males, to have
and to hold,
And you mate and you breed without nature’s need, while your hearts
and your bodies are cold.

‘All unwanted your offspring come, or you slay them before they are
born;
And now the wild she-things of the earth have spoken and told their
scorn.
We have no mind and we have no souls, maybe as you think—And still,
Never one of us ate or drank the things that poison and kill,
And never was one of us known by a male except by our wish and
will.’