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!

~~
Love & Light