Ask the jasmine What Hands Have Wrought: POETRY

This collection of poems grapples with questions uprooted from the soil of lived reality. Its verses speak to what a woman may endure along the passage of her life, a woman whom the poet likens to a jasmine flower, where whiteness stands as a symbol of innocence and purity. Yet this flower may be cast into shadow, reduced to the semblance of ash when burdened by life's impositions. Poetry here is a space of contemplation, a questioning of the self, an assertion of its existence, even if that requires an act of rebellion: rebellion against failure and defeat, against the diminishing gaze. The poet leads us through the landscapes of her search, and her verse breathes with an instinctive spontaneity and a sincere love of the homeland, leaving space for the reader to sense the pull toward interpretation, toward a rewriting of the self through the prism of I and Other. Poetry draws us into a reading between the lines, a meditative reading that opens onto self-awareness, onto our needs and our longing. The aspiration here resembles an urgent, aching desire: to breathe into the world the values of love, a love that rises in revolt against falsehood and betrayal, a love that will be nothing less than true and fruitful, like a wreath of jasmine lifted into grace, renewing its covenant through the language of metaphor and faithful symbol.