The Unwritten History of Her

Before the ink dried on the first stone law,

her name was already erased.

She was bone and blood and fire,

but they called her property,

called her womb a field to be plowed,

called her body a thing to be tamed.

They wrapped her in rules

like burial cloths while she was still breathing—

if her dress was too short, she was asking.

If she was touched without consent,

they asked what she did to deserve it.

They took the blade to her joy,

cut the song from her flesh

so she would never know the language of her own pleasure.

They sold her before she had learned her own name,

to men who could have been her fathers,

her grandfathers—

men who saw her only as a seedbed,

a vessel,

a servant in the temple of their ego.

Her childhood burned away in the cradle

of a husband’s bed.

She bore children before her bones had hardened,

while he slipped away into the shadows of other women,

and still she was condemned—

a beast of burden,

a maid with milk still drying on her breasts,

a body split open again and again,

often unto death.

They called her too fragile to vote,

too weak to lead,

yet strong enough to bury her dreams beneath his,

to survive without voice or choice.

For millennia she has been

the invisible architect of the world—

hands raw from work no one names,

heart raw from wounds no one tends.

And still—

still—

her eyes are fire.

She carries the weight of centuries

and yet walks forward.

Her voice is the earthquake beneath empires.

Her body, scarred and sacred,

is the last holy thing they cannot destroy.