In a society,
There’s a tree called misogyny,
Where its deep roots
Grow into all girls,
Who develop in agony,
Facing judgment that feels relentless,
Much of it unspoken, a harsh irony.
This judgment seeps into our daily strife,
Trapping us within roles that limit our life.
Narrow expectations stifle our dreams,
While society’s pressure bursts at the seams.
We’re told how to act, what to say and wear,
As if our true selves are too much to bear.
Dreams of freedom fuel our inner symphony,
A quest to end this cycle of regulatory authority.
She bears the weight of expectations,
A load shaped by herstory’s complications.
With a heavy heart, she watched the tragedy,
As blame is passed down through each family.
Inheriting struggles, a cycle we see,
Each woman’s journey marked by disparity.
Disappointments linger, like shadows they stay,
A legacy of women woven in silence and gray.
The silence among women she cherished felt heavy,
An unspoken vow that let men be merry
Free from their own responsibility,
Caught in a system that kept them confined,
With “They didn’t know better” echoing in mind.
Hiding complicity in voices suppressed,
In a world where their wisdom was rarely expressed.
Each story unspoken, a weight they all share,
Navigating life with caution and care.
Yet deep in their hearts lies a yearning to be,
More than the shadows of what they could see.
In the silence, a strength that quietly grows,
A call for the change that each woman knows.

She is sitting on the couch,
and telling her story.
I am listening.
She tells a story of herself.
Crying and smiling.
My tears are falling down.
But I am jotting down.  
She makes me  cup of coffee.
And sits down to finish her story.
She tells about a girl,
with long hair.
She was ugly,
but became pretty.
Her mom was rude.
But she was kind.
She was ...
At last she finished her story.
My notebook was with full of tears,
and with full of emotions she told me .
She told me not to tell her story to anyone.
And I kept her words.

I look at the mirror
to only find her staring back,
she who's mastered the art of smiling
and to hide those stray tear tracks.

Silence is her weapon of choice,
it's edgy tip enough to raise dread,
in face of her frosty ire, one would
prefer the bursts of temper instead.

Like the duck that paddles in calm,
she too rests surrounded by muck
and underneath, her fury churns,
ready to blast it all to dust,

She's picked up every insult,
stored it in a corner to recollect
and designs her story of vindication
ripping apart every shred of regret.

Her hands are coated in blood
of the desires that she choked to death
she has emerged strong from battles
and slayed monsters who rest under her bed.

The dirt underneath her nails
should tell you the moral of her story,
she is not deterred by pain,
she is not enamored by false glory.

I see her staring back at me,
and raise her chin in pride,
her scars wave the sign of victory,
I only need to follow in stride.

For her art was all the colors,
Present in the makeup pallete,
Erasing her pain like cleansers,            
And making her life go all set,  
So ready to be brushed up with some makeup,
To meet with her all time pain healer,
By letting her face go through a little scrub,
She covered all the dark secrets like a concealer,  
She had a past darker than her smokey eyes,  
With eyeshadow blended so perfectly,
She looked so pretty and wise,
Killing people with her charm and spectacularity,
By using her lipstick dipped in blood red,
And like a sharp weapon she carried her contoured face,                                                   With her lashes so widespread,
She turned into a strong woman who got over all her depressing days.
            
                -Faeza Kazim

they say in history,
behind every great man there’s an even greater woman.
so think of it like this:
do you know who marcia lucas is?
it’s okay if you don’t.
there’s a reason for that,
until a few months ago i didn’t know her name either.
but you probably know who george lucas is.
biographer dale ******* once said that marcia,
george lucas's first wife who he was married to throughout
the production of the original trilogy,
was his “secret weapon."
and the operative word in that sentence is secret.
because i have been watching star wars
for just about as long as i can remember;
growing up, my brother and i owned not only
half a dozen plastic lightsabers and a box set of both trilogies,
but my dad even likes to mimic yoda’s voice and speech patterns
when he gives me motivational life talks.
but i never once learned marcia lucas's name.
i know star wars super fans who can spout out more trivia
about wedge antilles,
an x-wing pilot with 2.5 total minutes of screen time in the entire saga,
than marcia lucas,
the women who edited the film together
into the cultural phenomenon we know.
marcia lucas is the woman who edited starwars
from a mess into a masterpiece.
the woman who has be described
as the “warmth and heart of the films”
who carved out her husband's characters into people
and developed with much of emotional resolution of the series,
coming up with the idea of killing off ben kenobi
when george lucas couldn’t resolve the plot line himself.
her fingerprints are all over these movies,
she shaped these stories and us with them
yet we never talk about her hands cutting the film.
the woman who edited the scene
where luke skywalker destroys the death star
from a 45 minutes crawl into the fast-paced moment
when the good guys win,
the woman who sewed together
the magic we watched on our screens
is nothing more than a footnote in the credits.
she has been erased from the narrative.
and as i write this poem,
i know that only some of you will never think of this name again.
and if you do it will probably be as trivia,
a fact to spout in a conversation about george lucas
or while you pop in a new hope into the DVD.
but sometimes you have to think about how many people’s lives
end up on the cutting room floor.
they say in history,
behind every great man there’s an even greater woman.
margaret hamilton is the lead software engineer
whose work took apollo 11 to the moon.
do you know her name?
you know the man on the moon but not the woman who put him there.
sybil ludington road twice as far as paul revere
to warn the local militia of the oncoming british attack,
fending off a band of highway robbers as she did.
do you know her name?
long before little richard and chuck berry
were ever even strumming at their guitars,
sister rosetta tharpe was pioneering a genre
with the first album ever labeled as rock’n’roll.
do you know her name?  
rose mccoy wrote the words to the song “i beg of you”
that elvis presley crooned,
along with countless more that other people sang.
do you know her name?
do you know any of their names?
maybe spotlights cast more shadows than they give off light.
we are a culture of people who forget everything out of sight.
they say in history,
behind every great man there’s an even greater woman.
we just... don't know her name,
no one ever bothered to teach us her name.
no one was supposed to.
history is not always about who you remember,
sometimes it is about who you forget.

do you know island, that you
are and have always been thriving
on the life that you give yourself?

unmoored you are not.

you are about as adrift
as the coral reefs
that ring your most sun drenched
shorelines

your history
shouldered with love -

you are rife with a certain heaviness
that weighs in a fastening
balance, a brilliant strategy
in cahoots with
all the others

it is true, of course
that we commune with the same sun
the waters drift between us and our neighbors
many of the same clouds are found
sauntering amongst our respective mountains

but you - you are filled with your own stories
they are still echoing,
incantations deeply canonized
from within those temples you call
forests
your very own cosmology that
you yourself
are only beginning to discover

H I S , T O R Y.

     From the Greek word histōr;
     Learned, wise man.

                                               Need I say more?