while you're ahead…

Holding My Beads (by Grace Nicholls)

Unforgiving as the course of justice

In erasable as my scars and fate.

i am here

a woman…with all my lives

strung out like beads

before me

It isn’t privilege or pity

that I seek

It isn’t reverence or safety

quick happiness or purity

but

the power to be what I am/   a woman

charting my own futures/      a woman

holding my beads in my hand