Welcome to Poem of the Week, an annual feature on this blog that celebrates National Poetry Month. Every Sunday, in the month of April, start the week off with an uplifting poem and discovery why poetry still matters.
The world is currently chaotic and tumultuous. But poetry can still provide us comfort and solace. Poetry is such an amazing and inspirational genre to take part in, and National Poetry Month is excellent for discovering its powerful impact. So let these words move you…you will not regret it.
my roommate one year in college
would say of my smallness
that any man who found me attractive
had a trace of the pedophilic
& i would shrink newly girled
twenty-one with my eyebrows
plucked to grownup arches sprouting
back every three weeks
in sharp little shoots already men
have tried to steal me
in their taxis corral me into alleyways
of the new city already
the demand for my name though
no one ever asks how old i am
though no one ever did i feel creaking
& ancient in the repetition
of it all i feel my girlhood gone for
generations my entire
line of blood crowded with exhausted
women their unlined faces
frozen in time with only a thickness
about the waist a small shoot
of gray to belie the years
i make up names to hand
to strangers at parties
i trim years from my age & share without
being asked that i am
fifteen seventeen & no one blinks
no one stops wanting
i am disappeared like all the girls
before me around me
all the girls to come
everyone thinks
i am a little girl & still
they hunt me still they show their teeth
i am so tired i am
one thousand years old one thousand
years older when touched
cup of tea with that book, please
Copyright © 2019 by Safia Elhillo. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 13, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
You can get books by Safia Elhillo at Bookshop.org!
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