A poem by SABEERA DAR, featured in the UCLU BME poetry collection Word Out.
Your body is a memorial of all that it once held
These scarred linings of ovaries collapsing into themselves
collecting damage as the months accumulate
internalising missed opportunities these
vessels form a nexus that lead nowhere,
see you’re tainted by the all paths you took and could not evade
those irises are riot gear or the night before a raid,
bones be feeling weightless but there’s so much sedimented there
hair harbouring a legacy
molecules spun upon a history even if it falls this ancestry won’t leave; it’s plastered in the
genes – that render your nights
concentric, manic, spiralling out of sight
perfectly erratic, your aberrations all align and you
tried to decipher
the interspersed divine but it’s a pebble in the sea
intractable beneath
this encrypted vastness just keeps coiling itself meek
refusing inspection
despite the caricatures we speak
prancing like ignorance with all the liberty we’re worth
(the walls never permeate)
how we emerge unto this earth,
bathed in maternal blood,
(it is the act of gasping for air from which we are derived)
blinded by the very substance that keeps us alive.
Copies of the Word Out poetry collection can be bought on the UCLU website: http://uclu.org/product/word-out-poetry-collection
Featured image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
