Lonely Voices

A Poem

To the little one

Who dilutes her voice

Dettol burning the lining of her throat

As she tries to sanitise their unruly noise

Forced to disregard her heritage's accent

In tones and rhythms that

Match the sway of her growing hips

Afraid that if the words

Tumble from her full lips

She would be misquoted

Becoming the making of a myth

Her, sitting there - disoriented

Lost in a world thats not

Her own - colonised and stripped

Even her minor truths are

Grazed at, gazed at and gathered into a pile

That whispers a hostile hush

Hurrying her back into a silent submission

She ages like the words stored within her

Cursive, tangled into loops of labouring

Thoughts and internal tantrums

Denied her right to vote for herself

Not afforded enough room

To check the box that

Gives her authority over pending womanhood

Once more

Her small voice, speaks softly

Hovering above the balding on their

whispy white hairs on their wrinkling heads

Not quite pentrating their maze of their minds

Her, in the background

Miming words through

Gritted teeth

A furnace of frustration

Forbidden to let her tongue

Soak in its spoken language

Her foreignness forging itself into a dialect

Unknown to the common itching ear

Her tiny stories

Leaking into chewed canals

That had loaned their listening

To less important cries

Unheard and unrealised

Muffled into the folds of

History