I wrote this piece and posted here almost three years ago and now re-post it again in marking the 16 days of activism for the elimination of all forms of gender based violence.
PETALS OF PRIDE
Mama, don’t put me under the knife
Give not to culture
A slice of my precious life
My body I feel you holding
In the warmth of a mothers touch
Betrayed by the act of folding
Into the excuse of social norms we use as a crutch
With your hands you cover my eyes
Knowing I am fragile like bone-china
Yet for now my sense of sight
Lives in the pain that radiates from my vagina
Papa, don’t get friendly with the razor
Let not a community of traditions
Be a girl’s appraiser
Hold not a feast
In my cutting honor
For the wounds are rising like yeast
From hurt for which my father was a donor
How can you celebrate
The closing of a blooming flower
As my helpless tears reverberate
And I sit in the remains of my bloody shower
They have cut me open now, Ma!
And taken away my labia
They have sewn me up now, Pa!
Deformed my genitalia
My voice is drowned
In the rhetoric of
Infibulation
And the forced entry of penetration
My vagina a medical journal
Riddled by excision
And cutters calling it
Mere female circumcision
How have I been transformed into a vessel
Carrying the burden of a man’s sexual pleasure
Robbed of my rights to even wrestle
For the part of me I treasure
Mama, don’t put me under the knife
Give not to culture
A slice of my precious life
Papa, don’t get friendly with the razor
Let not a community of traditions
Be a girl’s appraiser!
~~
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~ Love & Light