The Rape of Humanity

I’m guest posting today on the lovely Sara Askin’s blog who is hosting 31 days of poetry.  I’m not much of a poet myself.  The truth is I don’t often “get” poetry.  I’m just not that deep, y’all.  But every once awhile a subject matter will come along that’s just too complex to explain through story telling and only a poem will do.

A couple years ago I took a creative writing class in which I had to write a sestina.  Heartbroken over human trafficking,  I was inspired by an online article about an escaped sex slave and wrote the following…

The room was filthy and cockroach infested.

Locked in a cage.   Shocked with electrical wire.  Whipped with metal cables until raw,

it all culminated in gang rape.

My mother sold me at 7. Twenty times a day my legs were pried open.

Burned with hot pokers forced to lie under the cover of biting insects was the torture

for a failed escape. I took my chances: fate would give me death or freedom.

There are 12 million of us, voiceless, desperate to be free.

But 32 billion reasons why selling our womanhood remains a global infestation…

You can read the rest of this poem/sestina here.

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