Perhaps a headline featuring 'excised clitoris'
was considered improper by the editors of Life
so they ran this one instead:
'A girl in Cairo is circumcised.'

The surgeon looks a little bored,
as you might be with a fretful child
who's fallen down and skinned her knee:
tsk, tsk, that doesn't really hurt now.

The girl is desperate to escape,
falling forward in the reader's arms,
simultaneously realizing this horror:
escape is not an option.

In an economy rather like the single stroke
that removed her clitoris and labia,
the photographer has captured both feelings
in this one snapshot.

After centuries of trying
to rearrange destiny, no one seems to get it.
The knives don't stop it.
The girls are still born with clits.


(Life magazine, October 1991, 'The Journey of Our Lives')

Lynn Cohen

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/80-million-african-women-are-circumcised/