As part of my journey of healing I had to acknowledge a daughter I terminated many years ago. The process involved giving her a name, conducting a traditional ceremony and acknowledging the fact that I don't have a child, I have children.
This is a poem that came to me on the day of the naming ceremony:
Battle stories of wars lost and won in our wombs go untold. Turning our bodies into battle fields of un-cried tears and unmourned babies. So much blood shed, blood blocked, blood shamed, blood denied. They abort and deny us, they mute and choke us, they don’t know they don’t know. They don’t know the hole they try to refill with all they gained at our expense, can only ever truly be filled by the truth.
Remember Us
Name Us
Honour Us
Embrace us like those you saw fit to keep.
The Children Remember
The womb is a place of storytelling,
Horrors are stories too my dear.
This is the reason why I'm sometimes so terrified of my writing, at times I'm haunted by it. But it takes courage to face and claim and honour the voices that speak through me as a writer, and as I said... as a mother.
No comments:
Post a Comment