Red-flagged Words

They took the words and locked them away,
Women, history, equity, diversity
sealed in silence, stamped with red,
as if the world could be unwritten.

They say a vanished word is a vanished truth,
that if we do not speak of bridges burned,
there will be no ash, no scars, no ghosts
only the echo of power unchallenged.

If we cannot name what’s broken,
how will we know what to mend?
If we cannot say women,
who will remember their fight?

Yet history does not live on the tongue.
It coils in the marrow of the beaten,
etched into the bones of the dispossessed,
a shadow script beneath the skin.

Persistence is resistance
not in whispers, not in breath,
but in the weight of bodies standing,
in hands that carve truth from silence.

They red-flag language,
tear pages from books,
cast voices into the abyss
but we drag them back, ink-stained and unbroken,
and we write them louder.