I. What They Did Not Ask
Before the first law was written in stone,
before the first man called her modest or loose,
she dressed herself in morning light alone —
her body: her first country, her own truth.
Then came the hands that claimed to know better,
the pulpit and the parliament, the gaze
that measured her worth by hem and tether,
and built her cage from scripture and from praise.
They called it protection. They called it order.
They drew the line of virtue on her skin.
But sovereignty has never had a border —
the self is where all freedom must begin.
---
II. On Exploitation
She is sold in pieces in the marketplace —
her lips to sell the lipstick, legs to sell the car,
her silence bought, her body commonplace,
a currency that never bears her scar.
The billboards strip her down and call it freedom,
the algorithm trades her for a click.
She is the product and the hungry medium —
Look here, they say, but do not let her speak.
Exploitation does not always wear a villain's coat.
Sometimes it wears liberation's voice
and whispers: Show yourself — then pulls her throat
before she learns the difference between free and choice.
---
III. Sovereignty
My body is not metaphor, not monument,
not message sent to men on either side.
It is the only house I was ever meant
to govern, furnish, lock, or open wide.
I am not the sum of what I cover or reveal.
No cloth makes me a question to be solved.
The hands that reach to legislate what I feel
have missed the point entirely — I have evolved.
To own oneself completely, bone and breath —
this is the oldest revolution, unrecorded:
the woman who chose herself against all threat
and was called dangerous for it. She was not.
She was simply whole.
---
IV. Hijab — The Testimony I Write Myself
Do not pity what you do not understand.
This fabric is not a wall — it is a door
I open from the inside, with my own hand,
and what lies beyond it is entirely more
than you have been taught to imagine.
I have heard your worry dressed as feminism,
your freedom that begins where my faith begins
to inconvenience your theorism.
But I am the woman who reads at midnight,
who argues, who leads, who earns, who prays —
the hijab did not dim a single light.
It freed me from your evaluating gaze.
I dressed myself not for your comfort or your scorn,
not for the man who wants me covered or bare —
I dressed for something quieter, something worn
inside the chest, like a private, steady prayer.
---
V. The Both/And
Honor the woman who removes the veil.
Honor the woman who lifts it to her crown.
Honor the girl who is told she must unveil.
Honor the girl who is forcibly pinned down.
The enemy is force — in every direction —
the husband who commands, the state that bans,
the court that legislates divine protection,
the mob that burns what it cannot understand.
Women are not symbols to be deployed
in culture wars where no one asks their name.
A woman forced is a woman destroyed —
and that is true in every language, just the same.
---
Coda
Give her the word choice — and mean it.
Give her the law that holds her testimony.
Give her the world that does not need to free her
from herself.
She has always known
her own way home.
Subject: This poetry generated via machine and human thought talks about women's right and explores their position especially in regressive societies.
Good Day
