Choosing the title of this poem to be the title for the whole collection
was not an easy thing.
My working title for the past couple of years was “Rose Planet” after a poem by that name. I had a nagging suspicion that it was too quiet and nondescript, and suspected that the collection was doomed to remain sub rosa. I just didn’t have the nerve to change it.
I thought, “No man will pick up a book called `Walk Like the Queen You Have Forgotten You Are’— Wait a minute! — Women are half the population of the world! Surely there are enough for me to find my audience.” So I finally found the nerve to change the title.
“Walk like the queen you have forgotten you are” was said to me many years ago by a dear friend, an old Englishman. I think it has meaning even if no one opens the book.
Just today I was thinking about how difficult it can sometimes be to do what one really wants to do; how some people — I suspect mostly women — practically apologize for living. Being older I might think, “Well, I was raised a certain way, but the younger generation of women, professional and competent, don’t have that conditioning.”
But today as I walked my dog-friend Marco, a yorkiepoo, we met a young woman walking a little brown poodle. After the dogs greeted each other Marco wet on a gate. The little brown poodle stepped right up and wet on top of it, and his owner said, “I’m sorry.” She apologized!
Even I said “Why are you apologizing???”