🫧🎙Event Announcement/Review🫧🎙- Bridie Breen’s Dead Women Walking Poem🫧🎙

#event #launch #review #16DaysOfActivism #Day5-EliminationOfGenderBased Violence #noexcuses #stop violenceagainstwomen #hearherstory

Dead Women Walking

What’s it all about? A quietly muttered 
lip-readable query, between couples 
walking hand in hand.
‘it’s about Domestic Violence.
 ‘Oh’. Is all they said.

‘Well it’s a kind of selfish thing to do’
one mother grumbled to her young son
Her way momentarily interrupted
Her sneer growled from her core
Superficial and unnecessary
to a listening ear
Her child caught my eye and smiled.
Women in red plastic passed.

Most who paused, were men.
Recognising, a single file of strangers
making a point on a November Day
by marking a presence in steps
One behind the other 
Shadows of those living 
without those dead.
A scroll of names
Now deleted from human time.

Younger girls and their boyfriends
Shuffled through the line
eyes down, girls defiant
A backwards glance
Unspoken words
‘Well it doesn’t happen to me,
so I don’t care’.
No, my dear, it doesn’t!! 
As it should be.
Just be aware.

One and one, then one more
Until over a hundred who wore
red, for the bloodied wounds
of murdered sisters, wives
mothers, aunts, daughters. 
Snaked a way through 
Christmas shoppers
A visible reminder
of the women no longer 
free to walk the streets.
Or shop with children
Or go hand in hand
happy in themselves

Jealously loved as possession
then unloved.
One life to live.
So cruelly taken.
Red capes gathered up
like full stops 
at the end of a sentence.
Each a memorial
to a dead sister
Women walkers merge
Invisible into the crowd.

©BridieBreen, 25/11/18 Manchester.