Dinah: Daisy Petals

Genesis 34

imagine
you're fifteen
sitting by the roadside
plucking daisies
waiting for love to come along

& there he comes
a man
(the man of your dreams?)
& talks to you nice
nicer
than the brothers back home
he talks like you're a woman
not just the baby sister
he talks like you're worth something
not just there to be teased

can you blame me?

i went with him
i thought, why not?
he looked good enough
he seemed kind enough
i wanted to believe him
even when he hurt me
i wanted him to love me
i wanted to be loved

can you blame me?

my brothers didn't
they blamed him
i wish they'd blamed me
i wish they'd listened
to my story
but now
the daisies on the roadside are red
& all my dreams are dead

imagine
you're fifteen
sitting by a graveside
plucking daisies
knowing love won't come along
because you're
second-hand goods
because no one listened to you
though they said they were
"only protecting you"
because they killed the only one
who would still take you now

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[May 2012 - commentary edited August 2019]

I left out all capitals and most punctuation to make it really look like a teenager is speaking. I'm even considering removing all apostrophes but maybe that will make it look a bit too atrociously spelled.

Tried to put myself into Dinah's head. I first learnt about this story as a "cautionary tale" what happens when you trust strange men. There are different theories about the Dinah story, whether it was a rape, whether Dinah really cared about Shechem but her family didn't approve ("The Red Tent" gives an interesting spin on that possibility), ... Here I wanted to try to look at it from the perspective of a teenager waiting for love, curious about love, and falling into the wrong kind of romance - but then also suffering the consequences of a patriarchal system, where victims of abuse end up rejected, suffering even more.

A theme in my mind here was: Who listened to Dinah? Did anyone listen to her? What did she want? As the only sister of twelve brothers, I can imagine Dinah often did not feel taken seriously. Maybe that made her open up to Shechem. But then in the whole situation with Shechem, nobody cared to ask her how she was doing. Her brothers committed a massacre for her sake - but did that help her? Dinah is one of the many mute women of the Bible - women whose point of view we just don't hear. And we can say that the Bible is terrible for keeping women silent - or we can be glad that these stories are included, that in this way these women are seen, are remembered. And the very fact that they are silent, that their voices are not included, can be a wake-up call to us, a reminder of all the women who are being kept silent even today, a reminder maybe to ask others and listen to them, instead of making decisions over their heads like Dinah's brothers did.


Another Dinah poem: "Stop Me"

Picture by William-Adolphe Bouguereau