Why not me?

-

 


I rose where mountain rivers learned to sing,

A wild-born child beneath the forest's wing.

The dawn poured liquid gold upon my face,

The earth received my bare and gentle grace.

**

The jasmine climbed the shoulders of the stone,

The wandering wind declared that I was own.

The clouds crossed kingdoms, fearless, vast, and free-

Yet freedom was a forbidden word for me.

**

The river chose its pathway to the sea;

Why was that sacred choice denied to me?

The eagle stitched its shadow through the sky;

Why must a woman's dearest visions die?

**

The moon lays silver on the beggar's roof,

Yet I must spend my life providing proof.

The mountain stands alone and earns your praise;

A woman stands alone and bears disgrace.

**

I heard old customs whisper through the years:

"Submit your dreams. Obedience conquers fears."

Like roots of iron underneath the ground,

Their unseen chains encircled all around.

**

The tragedy was never in my fall,

But in the minds that built the prison wall.

Not death itself, but thoughts too blind to see

A village girl as fully wild and free.

**

Who taught you love must always wear a chain?

Who taught you fear deserves a noble name?

Would you imprison rain within your hand,

Or bind the restless tides with rope and sand?

**

Would you command the stars to cease their flight,

Or order dawn to wait beyond the night?

Would you confine the fragrance born of spring,

Or clip for kindness every skylark's wing?

**

Then tell me why, through century and age,

You lock a woman in a smaller cage.

What secret terror haunts the human mind

That freedom in a woman seems unkind?

**

I watched the elders guarding ancient laws,

Protecting wounds while calling them a cause.

I saw how fear disguised itself as care,

How power hid beneath the mask of prayer.

**

A free-born woman frightened hearts the most,

And so they made a virtue of the ghost.

They called possession love and silence grace,

And taught submission as a woman's place.

**

I was a flute cut from the forest reed,

Made not for silence but for song and need.

My voice ran clear as streams in morning light,

Yet judgment hunted every dream from sight.

**

A blossom crushed beneath a careless boot,

A temple drowning slowly under soot,

A butterfly concealed behind a screen-

Such are the countless lives that might have been.

**

The deer runs laughing through the field and glen,

The waves refuse to bow their heads to men.

The forests grow wherever roots belong,

The nightingale still keeps her sovereign song.

**

The wind owns nothing, yet it wanders far.

The sea asks leave from neither shore nor star.

The clouds seek no permission from the sky;

Then tell me why a woman must comply.

**

By what strange law, by what distorted scheme,

Must I surrender every cherished dream?

Why is humanity so quick to claim

A woman's freedom threatens honor's name?

**

The chains on women never sheltered life;

They sharpened only sorrow, fear, and strife.

They merely guarded customs old and worn,

Like tombs where generations grieved unborn.

**

Yet still I rise through memory and pain,

Through every loss delivered like the rain.

Like seeds that split the granite from below,

Like rivers that through hardest mountains flow.

**

I am the voice that echoes through the years,

The shape returning through your hidden fears.

I am the daughter history denied,

The soul that neither silence could divide.

**

And I shall ask beneath the endless sun,

Until all daughters stand as only one:

If birds may fly and rivers freely run,

If earth belongs alike to moon and sun,

**

If every living thing is free to be-

Why not a woman?

Why not me?

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