Four centuries pass, yet echoes remain,
A woman’s cry met with silence again.
Laws were written, inked with good grace,
Yet bruises still bloom in the same hidden place.
The chains are less visible, but still they confine,
A whisper, a threat—unwritten lines.
Justice pretends to be blind and fair,
But turns away when she’s gasping for air.
She flees, she pleads, but where can she go?
The system still asks what she should have known.
“Why did you stay?” they say with a sigh,
As if love was her crime, as if she chose to die.
Four hundred years, yet history repeats—
A woman still fights to stand on her feet.
On January 31, 1641, the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s Body of Liberties declared that a married woman should be “free from bodilie correction or stripes by her husband.” It was one of the earliest legal protections against domestic violence in what would become the United States—a recognition that a woman’s body was not her husband’s to wound.
And yet, four centuries later, how much has truly changed?
Four Hundred Years and Still is a reflection on the persistent cycles of abuse, the systemic failures that allow them to continue, and the way society still asks women to justify their survival. It speaks to the echoes of history, where laws may evolve, but the lived reality for many remains strikingly familiar. This poem is for every woman who has been asked, “Why did you stay?” instead of, “Why did he harm you?” It is for those who fought, who fled, who survived, and those who didn’t.
Because four hundred years should have been long enough.
