They wove stories together,
stories with power
that hailed from dusted books
that still boasted fingerprints
from the centuries before
and yet they never told my story,
they erased the narratives
that they wished away,
their guilt and shame
overtook them to rewrite history
so I wish to lift the voices
of the ones we never heard,
there had to be someone
out there
who experienced life
like me,
perhaps the quiet housewife
who never spoke
but always cried
or the woman
years ahead of her time
who spoke her truth
and wrote her wish
of an equal future
or maybe even the ones locked away,
with screams turned to whispers
and silence forced into compliance-
who were we?