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




Thank you for sharing so movingly the sad but very real experience of Her(our)story being locked out, locked down, locked in by the alien voices of his(their)story.
Its tragic that it is still very much this way, even now. Thankfully platforms like this are providing space for us to express and advocate for ourselves freely! I pray you are well x