Unborn Poem

I labored, but could not deliver
at the place where poems are born.
I wanted to birth a poem
in Thandiwe's voice, take you
to the scariest room of her
seventeen-month-old mind,
hear a baby girl's worst trauma
in South Africa, the world's rape capital.

Thandiwe's chocolate-kiss mouth
doesn't chatter words like "virgin myth,"
a belief that sex with a virgin,
the younger the better, cures AIDS.
Babies who play peek-a-boo
with trusted adults, cling to them
like love magnets, savor
silly songs, not sexual assault.

I hoped my poetic pregnancy
would yield waters of rancid reality.
Thandiwe would speak through me,
explain how a fragile flower was plundered.
We would hear what it was like
to be five months old, have two men
cut her open with a bottle, rape her
until her pelvic floor burned like a forest fire.

One year, three operations later,
her sewn-up body bristles with lightning
from her colostomy-bag changing.
Terror stalks her in dreams of demons
roaming freely like the men
who raped her. No security blanket
protects babies during a rape epidemic
swaddled in a silent conspiracy.

I wanted to bring forth a poem
with Thandiwe speaking her own anguish.
But, a toddler's woeful words
couldn't describe the horror
of being plunged into hell¹s ghetto
where her raped, mutilated body
was left screaming in a pool of blood
that almost washed her off the planet.

Frances Shani Parker