By Viviana Sanchez, TIWP Student

Every stitch in the quilt,

Every dab of a quill

Layer, to fan on the fire

in the eyes of every young girl

The civilized forest nymph

The wild female spirit held in the hands of boys

Tossed around like a play thing, made pretty and torn at the seams

A world, corrupt and lacking either science or god

A chain of daisies, full moons, creek beds

I prayed to the stars as a child

Wishing for forgotten hopes

Every drop of blood sewed into the ground

Every poem by a girl pushed shamefully into a drawer

Stand squarely and breath fire

Controlled femininity

Planned recklessness

The patriarchal breath on the back of your neck

Misogyny and goosebumps

In Greek myth, earth was a woman

She cared for the swans and the bats and crickets

Space was a man

He gazed upon the earth with his vast pitiful darkness

And wished he could stand upon her land

And play with her otters and run with her horses

Because Mother Earth was beautiful and he was empty and deadly

She nurtured as teacher of green endless valleys and salty sweet oceans

He watched, self-absorbed and hating as a fallen angel

Maybe that’s why men are so cruel, they try to seek revenge for the skies

They push Mother Earth to tears and poach her playful animals and capture her daughters

They force woman on their knees, to kneel for the Lord, for him

Mother Earth knows and she watches

She sends rain and fire, hurricanes and droughts to get her daughters to notice the battle

The skies are bitter and they punish the daughters that once lived harmoniously upon his impossible love’s land

He sent his children, his sons, to hunt the girls, to repress and oppress them, to get them to worship him, to send disease and guns and divide

to kill the ones who could still hear Mother Earths’ whispers

To punish the ones who grew the medicine Mother Earth gave her soldier daughters

To silence the ones who knew what the skies did every time the ground shook and Earth wept

This story, this struggle and battle has been sewn and stitched into every modest dress woman dressed their unknowing daughters in

This fight lies in every drop of blood woman reap from their womb

And it lives in every song and petal

The skies are trying to punish the earth for existing as a woman

The skies send this sons to suffocate his love’s daughters

And Mother Earth is hurt

So hurt

She is bleeding and weeping and drowning

But she will never die

And neither will her daughters

After they pass, when they are buried in the ground or tossed in the wind

They go back to their mother

And the girls who are still alive?

They all fight

Some fight the skies disease or bloodshed,

Some steal the wallets of boys,

Some plant saplings in the soil

And some?

Some listen to mother earth’s whispers

And write the story she cannot tell