The Body

A Poem by Aisuru

I brace my arm around her slender starved waist, showing her more love then she had seen.
Her head stiff, her hair drapes over her bruised body, strands neatly cover her shame.
I once rested my head on her broken shoulder, and poured tears on her freezing body, leaving her wet and cold.
She’s been the shelter for the lost, the homeless, the hungry, and the used, they lie beneath her not seeing she her self has been abused.
But with closed eyes and knees bent we kneel at the alter but did not see her broken womb, nor did we hear the growl of her empty stomach.
She stands before me only a shell of what she was meant to be.
Her lips chapped and long for water, they sit dormant upon her face to cracked to move.
Never have I see the making of a perfect face, but most do not see past the blood that drips, for she has been scared by the tongue of liars.
I cut the length of her hair exposing her shame to show her in the glory she has been made.
I wash her dirty feet, soiled with the dump of men who think they know, know the things they do not.
I clean her body with rag in hand and as I wipe the menstrual blood from her thigh she flinches.
The most heart wrenching flinch, she recoils from years of sexual abuse.
So now she lay in the temple in which she was made, clean and free.
Free from the words of man and healed from the wounds inflicted by “godly men.”
But she sleeps still caring the scares to show how she has been misused.
And I lay beside her, my head on her breasts waiting for a single redeeming breath.
This breath would make her whole, make me whole.
But we lay like lovers, naked and ashamed.
And I hold her with a love that only God could have made, waiting for the movement of her breast, and the motion of breath.
The air of redemption , the breath that will make us whole, the breath that of forgiveness for what we’ve done her.
Forgive us for we have raped her dry.