Chiseled Linen

Sorceress,

you’ve been silenced for resilience earned,

feminine power scorned, chilled, carved

into marmoreal heritage - broom intact -

washed linen sullied by the stench

of rotting petroglyphs hidden in wadis;

roots gnarled into dusty marble,

dull as the dugong your mariner ancestors

scooped in days that used to glow

like phytoplankton in the mesmerizing

dark waters of the Arabian Gulf;

gone are the groupers and pomfrets –

slimy, silvery-gray – gone the prickly cockle,

the blue sea-star, Queen Sheba’s hoopoe

swishing magic over the dhow-crowded sea;

scorned and silenced for your resilience,

sorceress, incised pride fit together

like past potsherds, seared into place by

the inept hairy hands of intelligentsia

and eggheads alike, smelted down,

then sculpted into a grainy, shellacked

stone frieze of a woman, sea-salt garnished;

like a peppery furrow shell

hanging a blue-striped ormer,

amputated, yet unrelenting,

you continue to hang linen;

voiceless, still you scream;

vision ruptured by years of

a binding veil, still you see

that inculcated injustice,

that mandatory cremation

of rights and dignity,

somehow you see, sorceress,

that there is a way to be free.

Note: A wadi is a dry valley in the desert.

Dr. Shurooq Amin is a Kuwaiti Anglophone poet, an artist, a certified interior decorator, and a lecturer at Kuwait University. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing and an MA in English Literature.  Her poems and short stories have appeared in Etchings (Ilura Press, Australia); Beauty/Truth: A Journal of Ekphrastic Poetry; The Cannon’s Mouth; Many Colored Brooms; Ekphrasis: A Poetry Journal; The Journal; Words-Myth: A Quarterly Poetry Journal, Miranda Literary Magazine, DMQ Review, and are forthcoming in The Rose and Thorn Literary E-Zine; Aesthetica; Pearl, Living Poets by Dragonheart Press, and Poesia.