BEACHED WAIL OF BETRAYAL
“…women will reject womanhood itself, if the condition ‘unable to move around freely’, both physically and psychically, is seen necessarily to accompany it.”
–Léonie Caldecott, “The Dance of the Woman Warrior”
Body. You have absorbed and adorned
rage from so many angles
from so many people of different pitches
bass to soprano
who don’t know
women,
what it’s like
to live most of your life
deprived of a clitoris.
The deep betrayal
down to the breath
of a beached wail in
distress left in the wake
of a wave of your death,
Mom. Where was the womanhood
sisterhood
you so elegantly displayed
to your friends
when you were flesh?
Where was that sacred bond
for my sex, for me, your daughter?
Kali. Shakti. Devi.
Shining One. Great Mother.
Am I a woman,
with pieces taken?
Kali, Feminine Force
Could I carry a child
and not hate my womb?
This force that runs from the earth’s core
to my root up through my vast mother land
can I accept it
without using it against myself?
My body?
These are existential questions.
At the core of society
we are taught to hate ourselves, women,
protecting our cave fertilized, unfertilized
while doused in rage, enraged.
(previously published in Beyond Words Magazine)
________________________________________
RECLAIM LAUGHING
My humor is hard to access.
It must be some kind of
room it hides in
until I have nothing
and then it emerges to say
see? Things are still
worth laughing about
my laugh reveals
life as a finite
gift a mortal joke
and I remember that God
doesn’t want us to suffer
that we’re put here,
all of us, with our own
purpose we learn
our strengths our
weaknesses learn to make
them our strengths
I’m sensitive,
and that’s positive
and I’m careful
with my words and I
love that about myself
and I shouldn’t
hate
what I love about myself
and I realize humor is one
of my strengths, it’s been
used against me, laughing
I’ve experienced
the worst of schadenfreude
from kin
and it’s time to reclaim
laughing time to
laugh time to create
a legacy of laughter
to smile at nothing
the whimsy of the clouds
and not feel stupid that laughing
is a gift and
gratitude lifts
and not trust fall
into that familiar plaster smile
that hides a peculiar kind
of depression
Taneesh Kaur is a teaching artist of East Indian descent, based in the Bay Area. She is a social justice advocate whose first love is poetry, and uses nature to understand and dismantle systems of mental and physical oppression. They have their MA in linguistics from SF State with a year and a half of training in Mexico and Chile. Se habla español.
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