Admiration is easy to feel and hard to describe, and Samantha Harper's "Women's history month poem" goes after the harder half. It names no queens, scientists or activists. It looks at one woman, never named and never given a job or a past, and tries to pin down what makes her worth admiring. Only the last line explains what the looking was for: "This is the kind of women I wish to be." The portrait turns out to be a wish, and that final line changes how everything before it reads.
Each of the four stanzas opens with "The way she...", and the repetition works like a camera moving over her. It starts with her body, then her voice, then her clothes, and finally her character. The movement runs from the physical toward the moral, from how she looks to what she is like inside.
The poem also keeps arranging her in pairs of opposites. In the first stanza she carries herself "like it's something not to be messed with / But yet so gentle." The stanza's one clear rhyme sits on that contrast: "messed with" against "blessed with." The sounds are nearly the same, but the meaning travels from warning to gift. The rest of the poem is free verse with no steady meter or rhyme scheme. The opposites return in the third stanza's "And yet," where she is effortless but not careless, and covered but not hiding.
The imagery of voice is the most interesting. Her speech is like "waves roll in and out," and the line itself swells and falls with the words "rises and lowers." When she sings, the water seems to get stronger, because "something's pulling you in," like a current. The last phrase is odd and good: the pull is "trying to get you to look at what it sees." The voice has eyes of its own. It directs the listener's attention outward, beyond the singer.
The third stanza is the most argumentative. Its closing sentence stretches into one long breath, as if the speaker expects an objection and wants to answer it before it is voiced. Her modesty is not "something to hide" but a sign of confidence, because her "smile and laughter" are "pleasing enough for the eyes." The poem borrows from the senses here, with laughter, a sound, judged by how it looks. Presence is treated as something she gives, not something she displays.
The final stanza turns to character with the word "faithful." The poem doesn't say whether that means religious devotion, loyalty, or both, and that openness lets the word cover several kinds of steadiness. Her faith comes "without any shame or insecurity," and the poem's best image follows: "a warm, cozy cottage in a winter storm." A cottage in a storm is shelter, and it is also a sign of someone who has weathered something. The door is "always open for debate and discussion, and for hugs afterwards." The order matters. Disagreement is welcome, and it ends in warmth. This quietly answers the first stanza's "not to be messed with": her strength is that she is secure enough to argue and then embrace.
The language is plain and conversational. "Like listen to the waves" and "the kind of women" read as speech rather than polished writing, and they give the poem a feeling of sincerity that a more careful version might lose. The lines also lengthen as the poem goes on, then drop to a short, single-line ending, like an exhale after a long description.
The title suggests the poem was written for Women's History Month, and its choice of subject is what makes it worth discussing. History is usually told through public achievement, but this poem points to something that comes before achievement: the example of a person who shows another what she might become. The woman in the poem is idealized. She has no flaws and no struggle, which is how admiration often sees people. But the speaker's honesty about the distance between them, in "I wish to be," keeps the praise from becoming flattery. The poem is less about who she is than about what it feels like to see someone and want to grow toward them.