johncoyote

International Women’s Day 2018 …

She walks alone,

barefoot in paddies of rice,

enduring backbreaking work for some precious grains,

in blazing heat, in soaking rains.

She walks alone,

in Johannesburg, with a bruised body, and a black eye,

battered by his fists the previous painful night, while the children cowered, for all the young ones could do was cry.

She walks alone,

along the streets of neon hazed diseased Manila, on sale, on display,

her human rights torn and thrown away,

she walks past the decaying hedges of rotten London, her hidden pain invisible to the eye, ground down at the altar of profit, slogging incessantly till the day she will die,

she treads the crowded pavements of brutal New Delhi, where men in perverted wolf-packs roam, her family in fear if she will ever reach home,

she is there, across the vast pampas, the savannah, the plains, on…