Female Education

While learning to shroud their bodies, women

Are tough lessons still more deep to cover

Thoughts and feelings from the time they talk.

With the air they breathe and the milk they suck

Is the art they learn in fashioning masks

Of sweet little faces and clever winning ways.

They adapt and move in their worldly paths

With the mask shield in place by sticky paint

And perfumed sweat. In side there withers

A thing stillborn within a living body At its birth.

Manju Kapur

Shame

We are told that shame is self-hatred and that we must not feel it.

We are told that shame belongs only to other religions. We are told that shame

means weakness and we can be blackmailed.

We are told that shame leads to madness, which we cannot afford.

But I'm a shamed of the men of my people and their brutal minds,

I'm a shamed that I didn't try then to see what I'm seeing now.

I'm a shamed that my son is the same as the others around him.

And  I'm a shamed of the fear for ourselves that makes us not care.

Nancy Nachum