The Weaver Sings Her Own

For seven long tellings I have spoken with the borrowed voices of the silenced.

I have been the monster's mother, the mocked oracle, the woman turned to stone.

I have worn the discarded bride, the slandered trickster, the queen of the lower world.

I have questioned the hands that carved the gods and the councils that carved the fear.

Now, at the last, I set the borrowed voices gently down, and I lift my own.

My name is not in any myth, because the myths were not built to hold women like me.

I am a weaver, and I have always known that a story is only a kind of cloth.

It is spun from chosen threads, and whoever holds the shuttle decides the pattern.

For centuries the shuttle was kept from my hands, and I was told to admire the weave.

I admired it, and I studied it, and I learned every secret of its making.

And now the loom is mine, for an evening, and I intend to use the hour well.

I will not simply invert the old tales, replacing one tyranny of voice with another.

To make the victim the hero and the hero the villain is still to let them set the terms.

Instead I will weave a story in which no one is required to be a monster.

A story in which the taken may rise, and the silenced may speak, and the strange may be loved.

Not because the old gods commanded it, but because I, the weaver, have chosen it so.

This is the power they feared to give us, and the reason the shuttle was withheld.

For to tell a new story is to imagine a new world, and imagination is contagious.

One voice recovered teaches the next that its own silence was never natural or deserved.

I do not know if my version will survive the way the conquerors' versions have survived.

But survival was never the point; the singing was the point, and the singing is mine.

Let the old myths keep their thrones; I am building something at their crowded feet.

A small thing, a woven thing, a truer thing, passed quietly from hand to waiting hand.

Your story, too, has been told about you far too long by those who feared your voice.

So sit at the loom beside me, take up the thread, and let us weave, and begin.

The shuttle is warm, the threads are many, and the pattern is not yet fixed.