Poem: What It Means to Be Afraid by Amirah Al Wassif

Photo Source: Unsplash

What It Means to Be Afraid

My tribe gathers around a teenage girl, her eyes blindfolded.

Her hands reach out, as though seeking a hand to shake.

The light of twilight disguises itself as a muffled scream.

One among them remarks,

"This is how funerals should be—

No voice, no dreams, no breath. Only the sound of a distant whistle in the ears."

A small rat gnaws at a withered fruit that has fallen from the tree of a widow,

eighty years old, who lives in the neighborhood.

A lump rises in the throat of the murdered girl’s mother,

as crows eavesdrop on her words.

Her voice echoes in the distance:

"They killed her! They killed her!"

A drop of blood traces a path, forming a circle around the girl’s head—

the girl who embraces death like a flower.

She appears beautiful, almost surreal.

What if she had known she would remain this way—blindfolded, head shaved?

Her mother sighs, as though she has lost the ability to speak

This happens each time the masked figures forbid singing,

each time someone dares to say "no,"

each time a girl dares to remove her hijab.

Amirah Al Wassif is an award-winning poet and author. Her poetry collection, For Those Who Don’t Know Chocolate, was published in February 2019 by Poetic Justice Books & Arts, followed by her illustrated children’s book, The Cocoa Boy and Other Stories, in February 2020. Bedazzled Ink Publishing Company released her collection, How to Bury a Curious Girl, in 2022. Most recently, her latest collection, The Rules of Blind Obedience, was published in December 2024.

Her work has appeared in numerous print and online publications, including South Florida Poetry, Birmingham Arts Journal, Hawaii Review, The Meniscus, Chiron Review, The Hunger, Writers Resist, Reckoning, and Event Magazine, among others.

Her forthcoming poetry collection, When I Met God for the First Time, is scheduled for release in early 2027 by Homestead Lighthouse Press, an American independent literary publisher.