Poetics: Rising from wet earth

Claiming humanity in an inhuman world

31 August 2026

I have been raised to fear my own voice. Terrified to speak myself into existence, I have resorted to double language, slipped sentences, carefully crafted phrases, metaphor, poetics. Everything to avoid the explicit I am. I want. I feel. Yet, all these years later, and the only cure I can find for my heavy tongue and my bound heart are the simple vowels of I am.

I have kept my voice carefully shrouded, lest I disturb the truth. Wild conversations in bedrooms and office corners, philosophising on park benches, searching inside the ears of a lover for fragments of my soul while the world sleeps. Everything to avoid being heard. And yet every day I look at the world and I want to scream.

I am a woman who wants. I am a woman who has been lost. I am a woman who knows. I am a woman who has struggled so deeply so articulately to live herself inside a world that was not made for her flesh. Inside a world that was made to devour her flesh. I live inside a world that was made to destroy me.

I have found myself over and over trying to fix myself, diligently, carefully, intelligently. All the while forgetting that this world refused to know me. Refused to acknowledge my existence. Refused me in the category of human, knower, worthy.

I have spent so many years fighting with walls. As anyone who has tried the same can tell you, flesh on concrete yields little pleasure, only burnt skin and impossibility. I have screamed my way through the earth. Begging for recognition. Begging for someone to see me, to know me, to name me as someone worthy.

Silence. And a fair amount of violence.

Bodies shoved inside of me. Emotions lathered all over my face so thoroughly I forgot mine. Forgot my name. Forgot that I too had desires.

But the earth, she is wise, she sings to you at night, she sang to me in my night. And over years - many many years - change happened. The performance, the obedience, became such painful structures, it became a simpler task to lie naked in the dirt than to keep wearing the masks. So I lay there. Filthy, wet, lost. Free for all to see. In private. In silence. That sort of specific female violence of the soul, so all encompassing, so gruesomely real, that no one dares to look.

My saving grace - every other woman who had lain in the dirt before me and dared to cry her name to the sky.

I gathered every last word, every last verse, every lost dream, deep inside my chest and tended to this tiny precious flame as if my life depended on it. Because it did.

The annihilation of self is a complex art. Deference to another’s dim view of your own being birthed inside their own deep and ravenous self hatred is something many people never see let alone correct. So as much as I laboured my time in the mud, tongue rasping for air, uncertain I would ever emerge, the dirt saved me. Every woman who had ever rubbed her face so fully inside the filth of being human saved me.

Because inside the dirt is written a truth. You can and you will survive. No matter what. Death aside. Really a distraction. We are enamoured with this concept of oblivion, which, while real, is only a partial framing. Many women die in the dirt. Most do not. We simply suffocate over the course of a lifetime.

I suffocated over the first three decades of my lifetime. Then one day I woke up and understood that I had choice. That I had power. That the cage door was open, and I could run. So I ran. I ran for my life. And I kept running. I will keep running. Not from, not towards, just as a mode of being. Majestic. Force embodied. For we forget as women we can also be strong. We do not have to choose between power and weakness. Like most binaries this is a false equivalence. Look at the structure of ‘man’, the most potent force of all and yet entirely devoid of any true power.

We must look for the answers elsewhere.

I started writing seeking to find the authorial ‘I’. I sought simple language, simple vowels, like the sweet words I read elsewhere. Yet in writing I realised these are not my vowels. My language will ever, can only ever be the register of poetry. I see the world in metaphor. I can subdue my tongue. And occasionally the truth falls out of me in easy syllables. But most of the time it is just this. Something raw and other.

I believe this comes out of us because it is the truth that the world is missing. There are many neat sentences out there. But what space do they leave for the soul to roam?

Find your own conclusion. For today my soul is done wandering. I think you are magnificent. You should too.