Ramsha Ashraf: We were the daughters
we were the daughters
of the witches
who could set fire to skeletons
of the ones who wanted to crush
the petals of our flowering youth
to get their hands fragrant
we played this fire-game
but not all the time
we had our moments of transcendence too
we also had licked the sweat of the men
who could brew us coca beans
who could feed us bread,
we also had our territories of peace
with our men in our land of significance,
we were not witches but the daughters
of the ones who once had gotten bewitched
not because they wanted to but they were asked to.
unlike our mothers we knew the meanings of tenderness and
love-pecks,
we could let our lovers use their bones
on our paper-flesh as pens
we could sip the stories from their lips
but we also knew where and when
to leave them deserted with their strangled isolation
haunting their no-more-lovely faces
we were the daughters of the witches
they forgot to burn in the wombs of their mothers.
Copyright 2019 Ramsha Ashraf
Ramsha Ashraf is a poet and playwright who lives in Pakistan. She has published a collection of poetry, Enmeshed (2015), and she was a 2017 resident at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.
It is a fine club in which witches brew. A grandmother assured me so. She was right. She was surely was one and, like the Japanese Fox Spirit, had some wonderfully crude country phrases to describe recognition of any sisterhood: “A fox likes the smell of its own hole”…. I never knew if she intended “whole”. I wish Nemerov were still alive. He would admire both you and your work. Cheers.
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Amazing Poem Ramsha. Loved it.
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