Today's poem is by Gail Thomas

Cento for Women Who Are Not Believed
       

When we are silent we are still afraid,
grown women, well traveled in our time.
These hips have never been enslaved.
Name them, name them all, light of our own time,
high over these robed men who curse me
and the ground spinning beneath us.
Now we are a voice in any wind
a succession of brief, amazing movements,
the fragile cases we are poured into,
this woman's garment.
I have divested myself of despair.
It is sweet. The heart dies of this sweetness.
Like amnesiacs in a ward on fire,
we must find words or burn.
I have burned often and my bones are soup.
Fire changes everything it touches.

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Copyright © 2023 Gail Thomas All rights reserved
from Trail of Roots
Seven Kitchens Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission