I stand. Not straight, excuse the pun if you would,
With courage, mind you, just not enough for this moment.
You stare at me in disbelief, with eyes trained to un-see
The painfully obvious.
Eyes are the windows to the soul?
Nay, they are so much more.
They are the doorways to your culture, to your gods
And their wills, and the gold-plated chains that link
You and your people to your imagined past.
I see in your eyes the perfect world that supposedly was,
The perfect order that gave way to the depraved today.
The disbelief in your eyes morphs into disgust, as your culture,
Like the evil soothsayer, peers from your eyes and whispers in your ears.
The moral corruption of my existence is immense, it says.
A few millennia old books
Scream verses in extinct tongues affirming the same.
Illustration by Shahana F
As I turn my head, I see
Piles of corpses that came before me,
To a world less depraved than today
Where your culture had the final say.
I see a woman encased in the shell of a man
Being denied her femininity.
I see lovers who couldn’t be lovers.
I see bodies denied the right to exist.
And so, as I stare back into your eyes,
At your culture and
At the screaming books written by the gods
I thank this depraved day,
With a little more courage if I might say,
And wish that your culture of death,
Withers and dies away.
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