Sorrowed Bangles

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I have heard defeat arrive

not as thunder-

but like a snake in dry grass,

hissing through slander.

/

When they could not touch my thought,

they reached for my skin,

as crows peck at ripe fruit

they could never grow.

/

My name was held to fire

like thin gold over flame,

tested not for truth

but for how much pain it could carry.

/

I have seen honor hung on women

like glass bangles on trembling wrists-

bright as festival light,

fragile as a lie repeated too long.

/

And when a man stood like a mountain

against the storm of lesser minds,

they did not move the mountain-

they poisoned the river at its feet,

naming his women as weakness.

/

How strange this old world is:

shame circles women

like vultures around harvest fields,

while pride wears a man’s face

but hides in a woman’s wound.

/

I have known insults

that crawled like smoke under doors,

sexual words flung

like mud at a temple wall,

character torn

as dogs worry at burial cloth.

/

But I have learned-

when they strike the body

because they cannot strike the mind,

when they bruise a woman’s name

because her ideas stand taller than theirs,

it is not power speaking.

It is defeat,

bent on its knees,

spitting upward.

/

My bangles have sorrow in them, yes-

they sound sometimes

like rain trapped in broken shells.

But they also remember resistance.

They ring like little circles of iron,

like moons refusing eclipse.

/

So I leave the vile to their echo.

Let them gnaw their own darkness.

Not every wound deserves reply.

/

For some men insult women

the way dying lamps spit smoke-

only in the moment before extinction.

/

And I-

I will wear these sorrowed bangles

not as symbols of shame,

but as small bright revolutions

singing at my wrists.

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