WOMEN PAID

Written for WILDE poetry seminar and festival 2006. Women have been exposed to some of the worst atrocities meted out to humanity.

 Women Paid

Yes. Mother earth

We the women of the earth

Want you to bring to the attention

Of the world and,

Let them know that we paid.

Pay every day a child is created

Paid with the release of pure

Energy of love for its father,

 Or with the cry of hate and rage

 At the unwanted, wanton abuse

Of our bodies from men who

Assault them without our consent.

We release in your atmosphere

 A blessing of love or a curse of hate

 That keeps rumbling their energies

Down the annals of time that keep

Reproducing lovers or murders.

 Let the world know that we paid

When the child we have created seek to rip

Our bodies asunder in a bid to escape us.

While our cries echo in the universe

 Liberating energies of pain, we paid

We pay with smiles and sighs of joy

At the first cry of a triumphant entry

Of our sons and daughters into

A strange and unknown, world

Yes we paid you, by releasing to you

Love and joy.

Paid you with our flesh and blood

In your sewers,

In your bowels,

Creating soil,

That nourishes food,

Feeding all nations,

Continually paying,

 In the price of our blood and tears

Month after month

Year upon year

Mother earth,

 Please!!!!

Let the world know

We women paid!

 Soy Criada

RELEASE ME

Through all these years
I read your letters time and times again,
I searched them diligently for the words
I love you.
----------------------------------------------------------
Eyes of doubt are blind to love
But now you are gone strange things happen
Until today they laid there all hidden the words I craved, 

I stared, dumbstruck and grief-stricken.
---------------------------------------------------------
For there they were on every page
Screaming at me, I love you.
In so many doubts and fears
I did not see, I did not hear
Inequality is surely a robber.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Full of remorse and regret for the many
Tears you must have shed unknown,
Too proud to show or tell or let me know
How much the feelings,not knowing,
how the silent I love you hurt.
----------------------------------------------------------
I could not on paper comprehend the “I love you",You said in so many other  different ways,
Because I was listening to hear from your lips  the magic, melodic, sound of, I Love you.
--------------------------------------------------------------
All these years I wondered what became of you
But too scared to know and deepen the hurt,? 
For myself or maybe even you, I’m not quite sure.
So I remain silent like you, and bore all the hurt.
-----------------------------------------------------------
But did I ever say I love you or was I just like you?
Putting them on Paper and in so many other different ways, but too afraid to speak the magic words and say "I love you"
----------------------------------------------------------
For thirty five years I have not " laid eyes on you
Nor heard your voice, but saw you in every place I go
And all the people I meet, but most of all I live with
Part of you in the form of my thirty years old son.
----------------------------------------------------
Fate at times do play some very unkind games and tricks.
It gave him many of the qualities that were uniquely you.
Your height, your demeanor and even your profession  just as if he was your blood
You would have been proud to call him son.
----------------------------------------------------
I never stopped missing you although I have someone
I told you who loves me much more than you. 
 But today I met you on the internet
You had became old,  fat and grey.
But worst of all I saw that you are now dead.
----------------------------------------------------
Your obituary said you left to moan sisters and
brothers and the two sons I had already known,
It would have been less painful had it said a wife
And other sons, then I would be sure you did
Not travel your remaining thirty five years
Not sure how much you were indeed truly loved.
---------------------------------------- -----------------------
So today I will be like Pharaoh break my
 Vow of silence,and proclaim my love for you
Removing all the doubts of family and friends
I will speak your name, for this last time
 But to the dead it  has  no effect 
-------------=--------------------------------------
So  I ask my angel to ask  yours to
 Release me as I now releasing you
For Its time I truly love again.

 As I cannot forever remain 
Chained to your memory.
----------------------------------------------------
Soy Criada: in remembrance of my late friend Jasper Melbourne  Edwards Snr. (Ted)