Brown Girl

She girdles a hand-woven khadar scarf
Brown skin shimmering through endless fires
Fighting as a crouching tiger
Only to face wage cuts, hijab bans but
Her worn hands clutch the warmth of prayer beads
Timeless beauty and strength still inside her
Through the white noise that whispers surrender
As she embodies the last embers in darkness
She rides through borders sees buried crimes
Her brown virtue is eternal

Survival

representing wisdom from the fallen in her homeland
echoing brown can survive and will survive
waiting for her to turn to rise wild power within
no blood, no sweat or tears will stall her path
hear her grandmother’s tales of submission
with her khadar scarf flapping without the backbone
to vanish in and out of vision just to survive
her grit feeds, her faith breathes, her will survives
her crouching tiger will never fade
she will impel the survival of her culture

By Sarah Fathima Mohammed

Biography:

Sarah Fathima Mohammed is a high schooler from California. In 2019, she received a silver medal for the NJCL national creative writing contest and a gold medal for national Latin. Her work has been accepted in Canvas Literary Journal. She has been accepted and will attend Iowa Young Writers’ Studio in 2020. She enjoys writing various pieces in literature and Latin; creative writing, to her, is a raw form of self-expression that can be conveyed at any depth without the worldly barriers. When she is not writing, she teaches English to disadvantaged students, plays music to raise funds for kids in hospitals and enjoys archery.