I’m back for a bit y’all. It’s been a while but I’ve been up to a lot. Been dedicating myself to growing in my career, bettering my mental health, reading more books, and learning more about and raising awareness for the colossal issue that is human trafficking.

I wanted to share a link to my Linktree page where I help educate people and lend my own thoughts on specific issues that fuel human trafficking worldwide, as well as provide some links to charity organisations that I support that you can donate to.
https://linktr.ee/dashazul

To finish up this quick post, I wanted to leave you with this powerful poem that I found in a poetry collection.

Someone is Beating a Woman
by Andrei Voznesensky

Someone is beating a woman
In the car that is dark and hot
Only the whites of her eyes shine.
Her legs thrash against the roof
Like berserk searchlight beams.

Someone is beating a woman.
This is the way slaves are beaten.
Frantic, she wrenches open the door
And plunges out–onto the road.

Brakes scream.
Someone runs up to her,
Strikes her and drags her, face down,
In the grass lashing with nettles.

Scum, how meticulously he beats her,
Stilyága, bastard, big hero,
His smart flatiron-pointed shoe
Stabbing into her ribs.

Such are the pleasures of enemy soldiers
And the brute refinements of peasants.
Trampling underfoot the moonlit grass,
Someone is beating a woman.

Someone is beating a woman,
Century on century, no end to this.
It’s the young that are beaten.  Somberly
Our wedding bells start up the alarm.
Someone is beating a woman.

What about the flaming weals
In the braziers of the cheeks?
That’s life, you say.  Are you telling me?
Someone is beating a woman.

But her light is unfaltering:
World-without-ending.
There are no religions,
     no revelations,
There are women.

Lying there pale as water,
Her eyes tear-closed and still,
She doesn’t belong to him
Any more than a meadow deep in a wood.

And the stars?  Rattling in the sky
Like raindrops against black glass
Plunging down
     they cool
Her grief-fevered forehead.

Translated by Jean Garrigue, from Orange Moon, ed. Garth Boomer and Peter McFarlane (Adelaide: Rigby, 1975), pp. 58-59 (originally published in Voznesensky’s Antiworlds [1966]).