The Unspoken Red

By Dr Vyshakh P

Ask me about that day, and I will tell you.

Ask me how I felt, and I will tell you.

Ask me why — and I will answer,

for that was the day I first bled.

I never knew it was a mystery.

Yet, for many, it still remains one.

I doubt if anyone truly seeks to know;

perhaps it has never mattered to them.

She told me not to fear.

Yet I wept until my spirit tear.

She said she could hear me —

but no one was near.

In that darkness,

in that loneliness,

in that room filled with silence,

I bled — alone, undone,

dying a little inside my own becoming.

My legs ached, my body trembled.

My eyes went blind as shadows filled my soul.

My ears turned deaf to all their rejections.

My mind churned beneath the weight of their doubt.

“She is impure,

she is weak,

she is no goddess when the moon bleeds.”

They said it — with cruelty dressed as faith.

They made me unclean through their beliefs,

bound me in the chains of their ignorance,

and confined me to this room

where my eyes forgot the shape of light.

Still, I pitied them —

for they will never know

what it means to be a woman.

To be a mother, a sister, a friend;

to be a flower whose beauty lives

not in its petals,

but in the soul that blooms unseen.

I heard that once, while I was in your womb,

he wished I would never bloom.

That was when I reached for the cord —

to end before I began.

The white angels saved me that day.

But tell me, was it worth it?

To live branded as sin,

to exist as weakness,

to lose my soul to this night’s ghostly grief?

Yet some still see my worth.

There are men of honor,

men with vision,

men who know my truth

and fight for my right to simply be.

No — this is not the end.

For I shall rise from the ashes,

till my fury burns through their silence,

till my fire scorches their bones.

I shall rise from the valley of death and fight,

till my light floods their eyes —

and darkness is no more.

By Dr Vyshakh P