Today’s New Verse News: A WOMAN’S FACE
by Ana Doina
Tweet by Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad 9/16/22
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Dark clouds covered the sky for months before the year Troy fell prey to a wooden horse. Scientists now tell nothing had been growing for years before chieftains took their tribes in search of better pastures, warring one another for the right to greener valleys. Homer decries the face of a beautiful woman for the first war, but tree stumps tell of darkness, drought; the bowels of the earth tell of roaming hordes drifting, losing their roots. The underworld brings back abandoned hearths, jars still full of honey, tools, cradles, toys, weapons buried where a fighter fell. The scientists can’t yet tell what covered the sun, what drove the peaceful herdsman to take up arms and leave the simple habits of his pasture, but back there, where ancient empires used to thrive, five thousand years on and, still, a woman’s face, even when veiled, is blamed. Is doomed.
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Ana Doina, Romanian-born American writer living in New Jersey, left Romania during the Ceausescu regime. Her poems appeared in numerous print and online magazines, anthologies, and textbooks. She won Honorable Mention in the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Awards for Poems on the Jewish Experience contest in 2007, and three of her poems were nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2002, 2003, and 2004.