This is me – this is us by Ayesha Ebrahim

This is the story I once judged with distant eyes,
Reading articles about women abused worldwide,
scrolling past headlines with casual disbelief
I whispered, “They’re weak… you’d never catch me beneath someone’s feet.”
Until life rearranged my bones and taught me not to speak so loud.

This is me
limping home behind sunglasses tinted with shame,
wrapped in a scarf masking purple truths
that refuse to wash off with warm water and whispered “I love you” games.

Second escape — broken ribs;
Third miscarriage — another cradle robbed from my womb;
A split lip where my voice bled out
and a silent scream that rattled the walls of my room.

This is me
victim to venom packaged as passion,
to apologies dressed in roses,
to threats disguised as devotion,
to a cycle society still calls a relationship
instead of its true name
a funeral rehearsal.

The doctors say the knife almost pierced my heart
they call me survivor,
but some nights, it feels like I died inside and only my pulse survived.

At the shelter, a woman whispered,
“Seven escapes before I finally breathed free.”
Her eyes were bruised biographies,
her lips trembling from truths her body still remembered.
Mine was the fifth attempt
and hope still feels borrowed,
like a house I haven’t signed for yet.

But hear me now:
this is not just my story
it is the unofficial national anthem of South African women,
a hymn sung in morgues,
a chorus rising beneath blue-light sirens,
an echo trapped between tavern walls and taxi routes
where little girls walk with keys gripped like weapons
and prayers clenched between their teeth.

This is us
a country where hashtags grow faster than justice,
where coffins arrive quicker than court dates,
where we learn self-defence before self-worth,
and memorize exit routes before multiplication tables.

We march, we chant, we trend,
but the soil stays hungry
and the headlines keep recycling our names
like expired promises.

Tell me
how do we heal in a land
where angels carry pepper spray like perfume,
where daughters check their backs more than mirrors,
where streetlights are liars
and silence is the loudest witness?

This is me
but it could be any sister, any cousin, any classmate,
any woman who once believed
she was immune to the monster she kissed goodnight.

And if my bruised voice can ignite a spark
in one trapped woman’s soul
if my scars can become roadmaps to her escape
then may my suffering grow wings
and become her revolution.

To the world,
I may be another file,
another case number,
another body stitched back together
like a broken paragraph
but hear me:
I am not done.
I am not disposable.
I am not a crime scene waiting for chalk outlines.

This is us
unbreaking ourselves,
rewriting endings they tried to silence,
and teaching our bones to rise again.

For even beneath the soil,
a woman is still a seed,
and seeds were born
to break the wall.

a poet whose work centres on themes of emotional hardship, identity, and healing. She uses poetry as a tool for reflection, storytelling, and awareness, with a mission to give voice to experiences often spoken in whispers.