The Lioness, The Tiger, The Dove and The Infirm
Snake were
about to start the sitting to judge the different
cases at hand,
when The Hawk suddenly perched on the court's
window frame,
its magistral
presence was not expected given its infamous laziness
yet, much to its disappointment, there were no
spectators to bear witness
to its hunting skills and its slyness in taking prey by surprise….
the accused jenny was already there behind bars lonely and alone as usual,
it resolved again to face its destiny on its own
and atone for its sins
of poking fun at its male counterparts who are
obsessed with mating
and also of
betraying its species by wearing clothes, cutting its ears and tail
and parading as a "creative" and "intelligent" human being
in many locations and on different occasions ….
after The Tiger's fair report, The Infirm Snake
which has been suffering
from Alzheimer recovered all of a sudden and was
plugged in
to give its robotic report of the case till its
battery ran out of charge…
then the floor was given to The Hawk which had
no single idea about the case...
being totally off the track and owing the jenny a
past grudge, it started raving and interrogating it about its religious beliefs
- "Who is your God?", the linguistic origin of its name,
the absent relatives and friends and other
pointless questions
to intimidate,
destabilize and trap the accused as a revenge…
the floor was then given to The Lioness who was
forthright and brief in its intervention…
in this poisonous atmosphere of mockery,
provocations, interruptions, deviations,
and
"absence of close reading" of the case,
The Dove built its judgement upon the others' views
and declared the jenny guilty of bluntness,
infringement of Law and fake
intelligence …
the poor jenny, who was dressed in white then yearning to hug JUSTICE and BLISS after
the fiasco of its « wedded » past
years, found itself again taking the
wrong path
towards an orbit where celebrations and cheerfulness are deadly sins
and where
gloom and doom are its only birthed twins…
Olfa Philo (Drid) is a committed writer from Tunisia and holds a PhD in
American literature. She is an English teacher and an ex-international
volleyball player. Her cause as a poet
is to voice the buried emotions and phobias of the oppressed and the
downtrodden and also to unmask and expose hidden truths socially considered as
taboo or shameful. She is a female rebel at heart who wages war against
injustice, marginalization, intimidation, objectification, subjugation and
violence against the « inferior », powerless and
« othered » groups. Her poems appeared in many international
anthologies of poetry and in different online and print literary journals
worldwide such as The Tanit Boat of Poetry, The
Poet Sanctuary, The Voices Project, The Sirens Call ezine, The
HyperTexts Journal, Taj Mahal
Review, The Recusant Review,
S/Tick Review, The Haiku Journal, Three
Line Poetry Review, Conclave: Journal of Character, Wordgathering, The Eastern World Newspaper, The
World Poets Quarterly and MeArteKa. Some of her poems were translated into Arabic, Serbian,
Chinese, Albanian and the Assamese language. She has published so far a play
entitled Sublime Revenge and a
collection of poetry entitled (Un)jailed.
