They told me,

"Don’t be too loud."

So I picked up a mic

and made rage my anthem.

They said,

"Girls shouldn’t talk back."

So I wrote lines that talked back for me,

verse that didn’t ask for space

but claimed it.

I didn’t wake up one day

and decide I was a feminist.

It happened slowly.

Like how you realize your shirt’s too tight

only when you try to breathe.

I was 23

when a boy said I was "intimidating."

I was 26

when a teacher said my poem was “too aggressive.”

And I was 29

when I realized

that was a compliment.

Slam became the place

where silence goes to die.

Where I met Ayesha from Delhi

who writes about acid attacks

like they’re love letters from hell.

And Divya from Kochi

who raps in Malayalam

about being the only girl in her class who didn’t wax her legs.

We’re scattered across cities

but stitched together

by metaphors and rebellion.

We speak in stanzas,

but they hear us like sirens.

This society builds walls

and we graffiti them with grief,

with joy, with rage

that rhymes.

Because protest doesn’t always look like a picket sign.

Sometimes it looks like a brown girl

on a mic, in a crowded café,

spitting lines that make uncles shift in their chairs

and aunties whisper to their daughters,

"She reminds me of you."

This is not just poetry.

It’s survival with style.

It’s revolution in rhyme.

It’s girls growing up

refusing to grow small.

So next time they say,

“Why do you always have to make it political?”

I’ll smile and say,

“Because just existing as me,

in this world,

already is.”

#Feminism #SlamPoetry #Empowerment #WomensVoices #ArtAgainstSilence