sara Etgen-Baker Poet Free verse

Notes About The Poem

picture of the poetess on the occasion of her 13th birthday and already well on the road to obesity

poem submitted to "The Rebel" poetry contest, Unseeking Seeker, sponsor, September 11, 2026

Line of Inquiry: “Neither desire nor aversion. Meditation our immersion. Conditioned beliefs discarded. Hymns we hum are our own version”

Quote by poetess: “True rebellion is spiritual: the courage to confront the underworld within and return carrying your own light.”

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The Rebel

I grew up in a house where quiet girls
were taught to mute their magic,
to inherit hunger as habit,
to wear obedience like a charm against chaos.
But a rebel lived beneath my ribs~
a spark fierce enough to trouble the gods,
a flame Prometheus might have hidden
in the hollow behind my heart.

I carried three hundred pounds of silence,
a body built from borrowed belief,
each pound a pledge to mediocrity
I never meant to make.
Like Demeter searching the underworld,
I wandered through my own shadowed depths,
both seeker and captive,
both the darkness and the one defying it.

Breath became my rebellion,
rising against the old stories,
moving through me with a slow, steady courage
loosening the lies stitched into my skin.

I shed the self-spun shackles
that shaped my silence,
the silk-thin stories I once mistook for truth.

I stripped away the soft-voiced scripts
that said appetite was identity,
that desire was disorder,
that change was a forbidden fire.

I felt the ego’s elaborate costume begin to crumble~  
its velvet vanities, fretwork of fear,
its lace-lined legends that kept me bound
to borrowed belief.
I let them fall like false finery,
a quiet cascade of discarded myths
as I stepped into the woman I was meant to become.

Like Gair splitting the sky,
I tore through the tyranny of my conditioning.
I rose lighter, sharper,
a woman remade by defiance~
a rebel who returned to herself.

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