YOU TURN

'Do you know what it means 

to be a man?' he spat. 

She paused to turn it 

over in her mind: 

a modicum of self-restraint, 

she thought, 

the willingness to listen 

from time to time, 

but above all else, 

the ability to sense, 

beyond the right or wrong, 

a deeper vein of truth. 

And she said to him, 

with a twinkle in her eye, 

'A more befitting question, 

darling, is do you?'