A Woman’s Revolution
By Colleen Murray
I am evolving,
where does that leave you?
Alone in the woods,
which direction will you choose?
Do you hear my song,
wailing through the trees,
cutting to your bone,
a haunting banshee?
I held grace and understanding for your ignorance and pride –
your ego, your silence, your failure to be kind.
I romanticised your helplessness,
your weaponised incompetence.
“It’s biology,” they say.
“It’s science. It’s nature.”
My innocent body – the sacrificial wager.
My deepest fear is not you leaving –
it’s me abandoning myself,
my home,
a cost you could not begin to know.
Unburdened, you move through life,
while I carry what’s unseen –
the invisible labour of all the in-between.
And in the dark of the night,
you inquire within my mind –
harvesting my thoughts,
my wisdom,
my light.
No, I do not claim innocence for the crown upon your head.
It has been sewn there by mothers,
generations of thread.
It creeps in through culture,
through tyrants and screens,
false prophets who preach to boys with wet dreams.
Toxicity disguised as something divine,
calling it ‘protection’ while rotting the mind.
It lives on through fathers,
through uncles,
through laws –
the keepers of silence, enforcers of flaws.
They hand down these burdens,
dressed up as tradition,
a legacy built on control and submission.
An awakening descends – a gathering of grief.
No saviour awaits.
Just the cost of belief.
You are now at the precipice; the decision is your own:
do you tend to the truth,
or reap what’s been sown?
Beware of the voices that keep you suppressed –
the ones who paint us as the enemy,
at best.