Congratulations to Dania Alzoubi for receiving third place at the Be Empowered Poetry Contest created in partnership with See Jane Write, LLC. This project was made possible with support from Create Birmingham, the City of Birmingham, and the Alabama State Council on the Arts.
Title: Irenic Breeze
Blinded me fully
With her bright eyes.
Sister? Perhaps not,
But wiggled close to one.
She was familiar,
Could lift up the sky with her muscles,
Voice her judgments
To the tip of her reach.
Strolled against seafoam,
Paralyzed her challengers.
But with just a second
She would become a stream.
Still blinding.
Still with bright water,
But, sinister? Not anymore.
She wouldn’t hold conversations,
For her distance
Concealed her bloom
And washed it upon the rocks.
She would be out.
No more concealment
Or distance from star to star.
She was never meant to be here.
That’s what they whispered,
As if she were a ripple—
A brief disturbance, soon to settle,
A flicker that the tide would swallow whole.
But they did not know her bones
Were cut from the cliffs.
They did not know she spoke in waves
That cracked against the shore.
Tomorrow was promising
A place with a different kind of bright sun—
One with blinding radiance.
Differing from the starch she lived in.
She moved through space
Like a comet breaking orbit,
Tearing through the hush of expectation.
They tried to name her,
Contain her,
Trace her edges and carve them clean.
But she was not a name;
She was the wind’s unrest,
The shifting of earth beneath bare feet.
A million sea stones away
From what her cells were accustomed to,
From the strolls she took
To the ponds and back.
She built herself in the turbulence,
Taught her hands to carve futures
From the hollow of a clenched fist.
Taught her voice to rise—
First a whisper,
Then a wind,
Then a roar that shook the trees
And sent their fallen leaves
Spiraling into the sky.
They told her to shrink.
Told her the sea was too wide,
The air too thin,
The walls too high for her reach.
So she grew—
Expanded past the lines drawn for her,
Unfolded into something vast,
Something too bright to be ignored.
She wouldn’t hear the voices
Except for the birds in the skies.
She would hear syllables,
Ones that weren’t twisted.
She became the hush before the storm,
The salt in the tide,
The thunder that split the silence in two.
She walked on water,
Not to prove a miracle,
But because the ground beneath her
Had never been hers to begin with.
There were others.
Women who held the sky between their palms,
Who built bridges out of broken bones,
Who stitched their voices
Into the seams of history.
Women who, when they found no space for themselves,
Carved one into existence.
She would not be erased,
Would not be washed away.
For every wave that crashed upon her,
She rose higher,
Brighter,
Blinding once more—
But never to herself.
It would be a bright tomorrow,
Sure to emit radiance.
