red clay women
Sarwat Rumi
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 elayhi rajiun.*
*muslim prayer for the dead, in arabic:
from the divine we come, and to the divine we must return.
Sarwat Rumi is a bilingual Bengali American Muslim who has been writing since she could read. She has a B.A. in South Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago. By day, Sarwat teaches youth in the arts and battles violence
as a freelance facilitator of trainings and workshops addressing social justice issues; by night, she is a vigilante spoken word artist and singer; and really late night she casts her witchy superpowers to bi nd oppressive forces. Sarwat volunteers for Apna Ghar; is the vocalist for the experimental music duo, Serpent Feline; and is a member of MangoTribe, an APIA all woman theater group which implements art as a form of activism and healing. Sarwat resides in Chicago with her feline familiar, Indigo, and a whole crew of faeries who watch over them both.
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