Poem | Jerifa Ahmed
When I am tired of being a woman,
I pretend to be a poet.
Two vices. I can escape none.
My 'half' existence has made me a sinner.
I fall in and out of fits of hallucination,
My 'half' existence has driven me insane.
Words aren't enough
But we have them in abundance,
So when I am tired of being a woman,
I pretend to be a poet.
"Just by being birthed, I have been sabotaged.
They've handed me a pitcher full of bloody tongues;
And told me it's my turn, to preserve this tradition,
I can't betray it, I can't betray it;
The remnants of the women before me,
So I bear this fate like a birthmark."
And I rage against these slow hands,
My Achilles heel, that can't keep up
With the train of thoughts running in my head.
I rage until my finger tips quiver,
Under the weight of these words,
Until my hands, mortified by their own futility
Threaten each other with dismemberment.
I am not just a woman, I am an angry woman.
"That's not my name, that's not my name"
Anonymity is a woman's forte;
I am no one if not someone else.
No one looks at me; that's not my name
The face behind it isn't mine either.
When does a word become your 'name'?
There's no one to call me by my own,
I may have been dead for a while.
I have been betrayed by my own words,
So when they poke, jab and dig up my grave,
Some thousand years later,
I'll just be a handful of dirt and bones,
A skull, two fractured hands, broken ribs, a pelvis,
Vaguely human, distinctly woman.
But ask the maggots once fattened up by my brain matter,
They shall know my name, shall remember it too.