When I started to write about Generation F, I soon realized that the people it covers are too varied for a simple word or phrase. This poem is an attempt to give this term a shape, while staying true to its diversity.
We are Generation F.
A generation that spans many ages, many people.
We’re anyone from Joan of Arc
to Hillary Clinton to Marley Dias.
We’re out here making fearlessness feminine.
We’re firefighters, snowboarders and activists,
police officers, writers and politicians
who are pushing the boundaries every day.
Fighting for equality is our forte,
and feminism is just one of our many causes.
We fight for civil rights and women’s rights
and immigrants’ rights. We fight for human rights.
Our diversity is our strength.
We wear our hair down and under hijabs
and in dreads and sometimes no hair at all,
sneakers and boots and heels and flats,
dresses and skirts and sweats and suits.
We adapt to our changing world with impressive flexibility,
but have the fortitude to stand up to unfit politicians
and have fun doing it.
We write, we march, we organize.
We make them nervous. They tell us to stop.
We persist.
As females we teach ourselves to fly,
yet find that there’s always someone there
to catch us if we fall.
We cherish the women who always have our backs:
mothers, grandmothers, aunts, mentors,
neighbors, preachers, teachers, muses.
The list goes on and on.
We’ve faced a flood of negative feedback,
but it’s all just noise to us frontierswomen.
It’s not our fate to be held back by the fainthearted,
and we don’t need to be famous to follow our guts.
We know what this world needs:
people to destroy the idea that
money is more important than our right to life.
It’s the same thing this world doesn’t want,
but we provide it anyway,
at Marjory Stoneman Douglas and beyond.
We are fast-growing, fearless, and futureproof.
We are Generation F.