Tag: surviving

VERSE | THREE-PART TRAGEDY

On By Mahvash K. M.In mentalhealth, poetry, truth, verse, womenwriters, writingLeave a comment

This is about all the women who are killed in the name of honour or privilege or archaic customs. Women like Mukhtaran Mai who was gang raped as per the ruling of the local jirga or court of the elders of the community. And Qandeel Baloch who dared to be bigger than the box she was born in and paid for it when her brother whom she financially supported, killed her in cold blood.

PART ONE:
Pin me, skin me 
Kick me in my shins please
Bring me buckling, crashing down  
Then grin as you haul me up
Dust me down, make an act of freeing me
When I’ve lost all my will to be me 

Churn me, burn me 
Laugh in my face, spurn me 
Then adulate, adore me
But airily, lightly 
Politically-correctly
When I can’t feel your torment or love
Or anything else inside me 

PART TWO:
Juice me, use me 
Mangle and abuse me 
Then write up columns flush with 
New found awakening
A social issues deciphering 
All the while computing, 
Measuring, forecasting 
Your own index of hero-worship
For calling out brutality 
Other demons, other sins
Out of your realm of reality 
But you orate and preachify  
Because it is your deliverance 
From mundaneness, insignificance


Roar out, be devout
Let your new found arousal
Wash over everyone
“Not all of us are like that”
Shout it out, don’t hold back
Declare it with panache 
You are righteous no one can forget
Everyone else’s moral compass 
Is a fickle sickle, directionless
You’re guilt free with that homily 
With your ringing voice and sacchrine smile 
You present it proudly to me 
When all I can see are lips and eyes 
A Leviathan dripping honeyed lines
Onto a transfixed audience 
They watch and gently chew the cud 
Of the weed that they are fed 
By evangelical heroes of prime time 

PART THREE:
Boot me, loot me 
Strangle me, shoot me
Then have a ball in my name 
Found a charity, earn some fame
Let the posthumous heroine 
With her tomb-tough shoulders 
Become your newest Taj Mahal 
Let her catapult you to the top
Always from her deadest parts
A pillaged body, a spirit crushed
A tragedy censored and hushed
From her countless cuts and gashes
She now hides under her eyelashes 
While YOU and YOU and YOU and YOU
Rise like a phoenix from her ashes.
Image: Fine Art America

VERSE | FIRE QUEEN

On By Mahvash K. M.In hope, poetry, verse, womenwriters, writingLeave a comment 
There’s a girl in the sunset 
Her hair is ablaze 
Her dupatta streams 
In the arid breeze 
I can’t see her face 
I catch my breath 
She stands there still, so still 
I see the horizon seethe and rage
Scorch her in its red-hot rampage  
I close my eyes
I’m afraid to look
Afraid to see the heavens burn
Afraid to see the ashes blown
Of the girl that is standing there alone 

But then 

My stinging eyelids fly open, I see
She’s still there
She looks back at me 
The blaze of the sun 
Now a shimmering red
Halo around her head
Like a crown. She won’t go down 
When her world careens
When her world burns all around 
Grey smoke rising from the sea 
Of charred, asphyxiated dreams 
She stands there serene
She gathers the light around her being 
She smiles, she gleams
She is the fire queen.