Tag: Women
VERSE | WEIGHT WHAT?
(This piece is about body image issues that so many women face especially as they get older. It takes a lot of character and guts to not let the negativity get to you. Again, this objectification is a product of our chauvinistic environments).
You’ve put on weight, wait!
Does this mean that you’re eating too many sweets
Or could it be that you’re finally getting old
Old, rolled, holed into the box
That’s been built for you, no u-turns
Nothing you can fox your fading way out of
You’re done. Stay in the shadows, woman
Know your place
Face the truth of tradition
Perdition
Hard-wired into your being, your biology
Know your place
Or we’ll remind you
Laughingly, ribbing along the line
Where we can jest or malign
I’m caught off guard, but I’ve also been
Wrought, fraught, taught
To feel bad for feeling bad
To smile wide
Wide enough to swallow his sin and my own hurt
My eyes scrunch up, almost close
Those windows to my soul
Beclouded, beclogged, becloaked
Lest the world see the state of my heart
He feels bad for an instant, he reneges
Laughingly, now ribbing across the line
I feel worse that he feels bad
My smile widens until I can feel it cut into my skin
His sin and my guilt doubled
Lancing at my face, etching unnatural lines
Into furrows that make me look
Comic, demonic, they take their pick
On the day they feel a rage
Righteous, man-ifold and brave
That they then spill into the ruts
Of my shame-shambled face.
VERSE | THREE-PART TRAGEDY
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.
VERSE | THE PASSION FLOWER VINE
Outside in the garden
There’s a Passion flower vine
Its little green tendrils
Have curled here and there
Where the shoots are fullest
Lushest, most verdant
They burgeon and grow
Weaving circles of rapture
Until they’ve spun around
Seven times
Lighting up the chakras of life
And then just like that
Their work done
Of dancing in the sun
They fall
Inside the house
There’s a woman
Her hair
Is tied up in a bun
She’s on the run
With little tendrils escaping
At the nape of her neck
She’s rushing upstairs
There’s a toddler emergency
And then she races like the wind
Into the kitchen
To make breakfast
And then she’s on the run again
Appointments, to-do lists, errands
To complete
And then back to cook and clean
To feed and coddle, kiss a bruised knee
The hours weave their set design
Finite, regimented, organized
But she has no sense
Of their texture or lines
The day is done and finally
She sits down for a while
Soft tendrils forming
At the nape - one, two, three
I hold my breath
I count the whorls in the curls
The longest one has six
I look away
A little thought flits up to me
Unexpectedly, a sign
Whispering secrets I don’t want to hear
Of endings on the whorl-bearing vine
She smiles at me tiredly
I wish, I wish fervently
That the curls that gather
Loosely around her neck
Is just hair soaked in sweat
In the labour of love
I pray, I pray silently
Into the depths of whatever’s out there
God, the universe, ethereal energy
For the moisture laden curls to weave
Their mystical circles for a few more years
Until they attest
To a life well-lived, joyfully
Until they wear their silver-grey majesty
Before they finally
Unspool in eternal rest.
VERSE | WALKING ACROSS THE STREET TO THE PARK
I wish this verse was more wholesome and whimsical like Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, but that it is not. This is about women determinedly forging on across streets, bazaars, workplaces, government offices, neighbourhoods and communities. This verse is also not so much about the woman hopeful of change (God knows that’s going to take its time in our blessed homeland), but the woman who is stoic and steadfast. It is the woman who goes about her day despite the odds that pull at her body, spirit and soul. It is the woman who dares to bare her true self despite and in fact because society expects otherwise. It is the woman who walks in her neighborhood afraid yet brave. May you find your grit and your grace for the rest of the days of your life.
A resolute, meaningful Women’s Day to all my friends and family 🌺
I wear my track pants
And a pink shirt, long
It says “Life is a song”
I wonder if it’s too loud
Stoking thoughts like a gong
A shout
To the world of men that teams about
The streets
Eyes peeled
For glimpses of variously clad
Women that are mad
Enough to sidle into the periphery of their sight
And special leery gazes
Trained like full-throttled tasers
On women who dare
To bare
More than the hand wrist down
Or a smidgeon of a toe around
Which sits an uncomfortable sandal
A Soleful reminder
To walk cautiously
To always look behind her
To shrink as small as she is able
So she might pass
With a warning glance
From the men sitting around
Jenetic Judges of right and wrong
For the women who dare
To bare
There’s a special gaze
For their fall from grace
From the fraternity that mills about
The corners of streets
Superior, upright
Pissing in plain sight
Marking their territories
For the women who dare to bare
More than the eyes
Downcast, demure
Vacuous and pure
For them there’s the death stare
Cutting them down to size
I’m one of those
Who - Dares - To - Bare
The woman within
The whole human being
Self assured, aware
She sits in my eyes
Unfaltering, dignified
Even as her heart drums inside
As she traverses that den
Of wolves, dressed as men.
VERSE | FIRE QUEEN
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.
Mahvash Mohtadullah 