As Property Protests - A Poem to the Voice of Shifting Unrest

 image by A.Rafaele Ciriello

They thrashed her within an inch of her life
Told her it would make her a wise woman, a better wife
For this Life was never about her skin that bled woman in the dust
She’d have to wait for the next

There were no floodgates; no bastion could hold her tongue
It sat ripe, ripe for bursting

Marinating in the velvet, thorny seat of her will

Fatima had to snare her trembling agitation

With prayers and bitten lips

She herself, had to hobble her insurgent instinct to express at the knees

Forcing her Self to kneel at every clock tick,

In every sunbeam

And every crack of light she could find

She’d pray

And she’d pray and pray

The tremor were felt all over the house

The neighbours complained of pictures jumping like lemmings off the walls

And china plates edging themselves off shelves when Fatima prayed

But no one saw it coming

Summoned, the air rushed to where she knelt

The windows got sucked out

The furniture, that clock and the kitchen pots

Flew around the room

How the cheap chandeliers and wall lamps clung

The force of this wind fingered the nails from the floorboards and flung them

Plaster from the walls stripped in great clumps

And the hinges on all the doors strained, creaked then broke

The noise was a thunder of bewildered wildebeest hoof

The roaring crash of water on rock from a 500-foot drop

The sonic boom of silence mercilessly inverted

And the acrid smell of gas and fresh ash woke in her nostril (oesophagus)

The scream incubating all her 21 years

Fatima had seen enough to know that

If her jaw dropped and lower

If her throat opened any wider

If her lungs drew the breath that would complete their involuntary mission

She knew her reflex

Would be Revolution.

As Property Protests
Inspired by an image of a woman in Afganistan
©Zena Edwards 

WATCH THE LIVE PERFORMANCE OF THIS POEM ON THE BOOKSHOW ON SKY ART 1 - 1ST DECEMBER 2011