Writing Feminist Poems, Protest Poems
This particular women's rights poem came to me in the middle of the crack-down in Iran on women and on the heels of the disastrous takeover by the Taliban in Afghanistan. As a woman poet and as a refugee poet from Ukraine, lucky enough to live in San Diego, it was easy to imagine how my own life could have been subject to the terrible atrocities disguised as righteousness in these regimes. We do not have to imagine extreme examples of abuse against the basic human rights of women and girls - they are everywhere around us and it is important to call out the hypocrisy and injustice of treating us as less worthy of rights or respect than anyone else. The skewed perception of women as second class is so universally abundant, that we find ourselves accepting these "norms" as normal and correct.