Men of Ash

‘To the men who have leered at us with your dark intentions’ — A poem

Photo by Caleb Shong on Unsplash

To the men who have hated our light,
and leered at us with your dark intentions

To the men who have abused us
and kept us captive in your reality of pain:

Thank you

Thank you for awakening the warriors
who lay hidden within
Emerging from the generations
of women who came before us

The ancestral trauma
of being female in a man’s world
has transformed us,
our auras a collective white,
purified, not clouded
by the ash of man

For ash is what you left
when you set us ablaze and walked away

But we burned like incense

And now we rise from what remains
as we trace two blackened fingers
across our cheeks
where tears once flowed

We wear our war paint proudly,
as we stand in our power,
our power as women
that no, you did not give us,
but we have claimed it anyway…