Slither Poem by Rachel Bari

Walls cannot smother nor purify
The hiss of the serpent...
It could not in Eden, in nature
It cannot now
Woman was banished then...with man
The exile of woman has continued...
man freed himself
Custom has imprisoned woman still

Fear imprisons
Fear of her body
But today there is something
More fearsome....her mind
Her hushed whispers, in corners
In spaces called Home,
In gestures unfamiliar and strange
The body changes to instill fear

This body which is serpentine today is potent
You need to train yourself to read
Her gestures...her tears are not
Signs of weakness anymore
Her lethargic body, a taut string
Ready to strike at the slightest
Show of sympathy

Her words are new, punctuations
Irregular, sentences creep to form
Images, recreate scenes on
Familiar spaces...the wall, the
Flattened roti dough, the
Bathroom walls, the soil
In the garden, scrapping
For herself to see that she exists.

You cannot read, your language
Is not nurtured in feelings,
Learnt in a classroom with walls
You can only create walls.
You, who broke free from
The placenta...
Cannot return home, how
Can home mean anything to you?