I am a woman

I am a lover

I am a poet

I am a daughter

I am a wife, I am a mother!

I lost childhood

with the oldest storm

I washed virginity

to the prayed-for rain!

To the wind

To the earth

To the sand

I am still a Woman!

To the stairways of

cracking walls

I am still a Woman!

Remember

the story of Tin tin in China?

The pictures!

Women bounded

Growing, but not their feet!

Hardly walking, hardly picking even a tiny thing!

Their fathers, brothers, husbands, sons

These are women

Paintings on the walls!

You twist your lungs!

There you feel a woman!

I am still forbidden

In your wild wide words

Fragments of encircled litany!

Remember me

The woman in me

So that I don't fall into a limbo!

Fluorescent lights

Resembling my breasts!

Pale portraits

of my womanhood

and

Mecca turning blue with my shame!

Liquid angels

Call secret meetings

to break

the borders of silence

Hidden in the closets

are my thoughts

My actions

are too purple!