My mother wiped the blood off
Between my calves, the first sign of adulthood.
I have seen what my parents did to my older sister when she first bled.
Now I wonder who will be my first husband,
The eighty year old landowner who already have four wives,
Who can divorce anyone of them for me?
Or the sixty year old farmer with more goats then he can count?
Or young handsome Ali Hossein with the Kalashnikov over his shoulder?
Oh woe is my fate to be born a girl,
Confined to my mother's experience,
Destined to cook and bear children.
No chance to read and write, only to keep the home fires burning.
Must this be the only life in the Twenty-first century?
Should I be born to a misogynist culture of consigning women
To a social religious slavery by masculine chauvinism,
practised more than a thousand years?
My prayer to God is of no avail.
If only God were a woman!
Khoo Soo Hay
07.09.2013
