​

Sherry Stuart-Berman

 

 

 

To the Taliban Re: Malala Yousafzai, October 2012

 

You board the school bus, ask

for her by name: “She who has flow.”

 

Grazed by the gun she

becomes that bird that bird

on the back of your doubt,

poised to remake your ruin

expose your rotting moment

to air.

 

What does it do to you--

your slack-eye, your skill--

when she rejects your dirt

as fallow, spits it out as rust?

 

The world will gape,

pretend what happened

is new, assume your aim

was accidental.

She holds to her grit.

In the hospital room, in Swat Valley

grief sleeps.

 

Scientists say the molecules

in her mind are descendents

of shattered stars: She will

not be denied deep space

to inhabit, a reach to sketch

her milky way.

 

This one you must leave.

It is our honey.

It is our shot.

 

 

 

Sherry Stuart-Berman is a therapist working in community mental health and currently in training to become a certified poetry therapist. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Earth’s Daughters, Paterson Literary Review, and the anthologies, Malala: Poems for Malala Yousafzai and Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books. She lives in New York with her husband and son.