International Women's Day, 2017.

 

          It is a strange world where approximately 50% of its population is deemed less valuable than the other 50%. What kind of species are we that thinks one half of our kind, is worth more than the other half? It is impossible to rationalise this sort of thinking, it is simple beyond reason, for us to regain our sanity this sort of thinking has to go.

         A poem for International Women's Day, first read at an International Women's Day celebration at Joy Kogawa House in 2015,

I want to write a poem for every girl and woman today
Who has been told she can't attend school although her brothers can;
Who has had acid thrown on her dreams;
Who has been shot in the head for thinking;
Who is forced into marriage as if her life weren't her own;
Who is bought, who is sold;
Who weeps or who can no longer weep
because of the men who trespass her body;
Who is beaten and fearful; who is beaten, but fearless;
Who is starved because she speaks out, speaks back, just speaks;
Whose house is bombed, whose village is razed;
Who is stoned for adultery because she is pregnant;
Who is stoned for a rape that male judges call adultery;
Whose family erases her, whose community evicts her;
Who has just enough money for a single egg;
Who carefully slices that egg for her children to eat;
Who is denied a single day off work;
Who takes on three jobs to keep her family off the street;
Who is whipped by her boss after days without sleep;
Who watches over our children in manicured playgrounds
while her own grow up motherless;
Who lies locked for months alone in a cell;
Who huddles into herself with eyes like trampled flowers;
Whose mind is trapped in the shuddering loop of annihilating night;
Who is told she is nothing when she is everything;
Who is told she is dirt, when she is the Earth.

Fiona Tinwei Lam.

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