Because God Knows My Name - (with poem)

More about Because God Knows My Name - (with poem)

Dedicated to all the women who were persecuted, incarcerated, injured and murdered over the centuries, because of their gender and executed on the sole fact, that they were "different" than the rest of us.
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People closed their doors to me.
They smiled and hid behind iron gates.
They despised me even as a child —
for my face, the way my feet found paths they could not see.

I talked to dead neighbours, braided their names into the wind.
I set broken hips, quieted fevers, brought life into this world —
and still they turned away, whispering at dusk.

In my teens the words curdled into accusations,
then into shoves, then into spits.
By my twenties the whole village leaned in,
naming me witch for every misstep, for every misfortune.

When the plague came they found a scapegoat.
At my trial they said I’d swum in shadow and sin,
that Lucifer had taught me how to bend flesh and fate —
as if the fear that raised them could be boiled down to one woman.

I have been accused and judged since childhood.
Now in this dungeon — dark as a closed eye —
I stitch a prayer in the thin light.
They say the Lord moves in strange ways.

So why must I go up in flames tomorrow?
Forgive them, O Father — forgive the hands that signed my death.
If Heaven needs the broken, the misfits, the special ones, who am I to argue?
I will perish and ascend into the holy realm.

Because God knows my name.

Amen.
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