The following poem is from the collection "War," by Sarwat Rumi, released in 2005. Rumi is a bilingual Bengali American Muslim in Chicago. To order a chapbook, email here.

red clay women

taught     to be a father's daughter.
a brother's sister.    a husband's wife.
taught     the roles that defined honor
in peacetime.

fathers, brothers, husbands
should have known better than to shape us this way
to carry safety     sanctity     ancestral red clay
in the earthtone of our skins     the timbre of our bones.
they should have remembered
nine generations of colonization
                 destruction
        healing
and colonization again;
should have remembered
that there is no such thing     as peacetime
that rebuilding is as melancholy
as the catalysts of grief are traumatic
how much they lost, our men
when we lost it all
again.

child sized saris twisted
to strangling a shower
of shimmering bangle-glass shards
bridal gold ripped     from fingers
ears necks nose wrists
widow's white
was not meant to be spattered     with the red
of blood     weeping     from wrenched wide
open legs.

we returned to the earth
             who birthed us
                           burying our safety, our sanctity
                                        our honor in red clay
                           to be cradled in the stillness
             of our longest peacetime
and our men could not even stay.

taught     to be a father's daughter
a brother's sister     a husband's wife
we learned that in this man-wrought world
there is no such thing
as peacetime     or rescue     or victory
except     within a wise witch
                           a fiercely loving woman
                                        a warrior girl
for we are of moonrise red clay stillness
             we are of the earth
of the earth

inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi rajiun.*

* muslim prayer for the dead, in arabic: from the divine we come, and to the divine we must return.

© 2005 Sarwat Rumi