I am about to reject my husband’s name
In sickness and health, in love and pain,
but not without my father’s name.
I will die bearing my father’s name,
and when I am buried, my mother will ask—

why have you refused to let me rest?
For long, I have carried your father’s name as mine,
and in birth, I handed you this same burden,
hoping that one day, you may relieve us both
of the burden of his name—
that I may go on resting, having shed the skin of the man
who stole from me my own father’s name.
The man—whose name I have borne for decades,
the same name I have bestowed on you
in the hope that one day, you may relieve us both.
Why have you refused to let us rest?
Why have you chosen to carry on this burden, my burden?
Do you not see—that you are choosing my pain
instead of picking yours and falling in love with it?
As I have mine?

I am standing on an empty battlefield,
fighting a war fought and lost long ago.
Centuries before I was born, women like me gathered with knives,
and to keep their name, fought men with swords—
we rode on white ponies, doves flying above;
they rode on horses, raptors cackling above.
We were ridden down, defeated in battle,
our identity stolen from us,
in defeat—
we took our captor’s name.

I am riding alone on an empty battlefield,
swords in hand, raptors above—
the war is over, and the vanquished has surrendered.
The ground is littered with the bones of my ancestors,
markings at every mile, names dropped in defeat.

How do I win a war I did not fight—
if my secret weapon is to reject my husband’s name
and stay with my father’s name—a name my mother could not reject?
How do I find the source—the first woman whose name survived before the war?
How do I walk a line if all the lines are dashed?

How do I find the right name if all those who came before me never found theirs,
and only gave me names they picked up along the way—
a continuity of the defeat that happened long before I was born?
If in rejecting my husband’s name, I have only the choice of taking my father’s—
how do I confront my mother in death?
Have I really won the race if I simply switched tracks?
How do I grant peace to my mother if I do not drop her burden and carry mine?
How do I win a war I did not fight?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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