This powerful poem was written by Beheshta Adel, one of our Learners from Brave Future—an NGO dedicated to providing transformative education to young people in areas with scarce resources and limited opportunities. Inspired by a conversation with a woman in her local hospital, Beheshta found the courage to share her words, capturing the resilience and hardship experienced by so many women around the world.
Here are her words:
This is the story of so many women I have known—women whose dreams were dismissed before they could even chase them. Some had no choice but to surrender, not because they lacked strength, but because the world around them gave them no way forward. And yet, some stood. Some fought. Some carried their broken dreams in their hands and kept walking, even when the path was nothing but thorns.
She may not fit the world’s definition of success—no grand titles, no framed degrees on the wall. But in every way that truly matters, she is victorious. She is resilience itself. She has endured storms meant to break her, yet she stands, unwavering.
This is for her. For every woman who was told she couldn’t. For every dream that was silenced. For those who kept going, and for those who couldn’t—because even survival is an act of defiance.
The Edge
She was born in the night.
No celebration, no light.
A girl, just a girl, they whispered.
She’ll grow into a woman, then a mother.
Nothing more. Nothing less.
Her life written before she spoke her first word.
She was born in the night,
By morning, they were mourning the fighting men’s death.
No one held her close.
No one whispered her name like a prayer.
She was just there, a life unseen.
Wrapped in shadows, she did not matter.
When she fell sick,
Her small body burned and trembled –
no doctor, no medicine, no urgency.
She would live if fate allowed.
She would die if fate decided.
And she lived,
but the fever took more than her strength.
It took time. It took her girlhood
and left her behind.
It made school a tide that pulled her back.
No one held out a hand.
No one heard her call for help.
Yet she laughed.
She always laughed.
Even when the shadows closed in
in a walled world, she laughed.
Even when dreams were fragile glass under her feet,
she laughed.
She played football with the boys,
She fought in taekwondo, in karate,
She dreamed of wearing a uniform, standing strong,
She dreamed of running free, kicking a ball,
She dreamed of seeing the world, of speaking new tongues,
She dreamed and laughed.
She dreamed.
She dreamed.
But then they said no.
No football. No competitions.
No medals for a girl.
No standing tall, no running free.
No world beyond the walls of home.
Only a breath in the shadows.
But she kept laughing.
Even when they told her she could not.
She kept dreaming.
Then came the men with questions, with offers,
A proposal from a man who was everything she was not.
A cousin. A man without dreams, without knowledge, without vision.
She said no.
They said yes.
She begged.
They silenced her.
She became a wife.
A wife.
Not a footballer.
Not an athlete.
Not a police officer.
Not a traveller.
Not free.
A wife.
The laughter faded.
The girl who dreamed
became a woman who endured.
She lived in darkness,
Her heart heavy with the weight of everything she was meant to be,
Everything she could have been.
But she did not break.
Even when she was silent, she did not break.
She studied the anatomy of pain
She learned the language of distress.
now,
She holds the hands of those who suffered.
She answers the call of those who ached.
A guide, a healer - not by title, not by degree.
But a steady whisper in the storm
that moors those lost in the dark.
The girl born in the night
she learnt to shape the shadows
into soft lights that soothe.
And now, she has a new dream
She stands at the edge,
between fear and freedom.
She stands at the edge
ready to leave.
She wants to walk away
to choose her own life.
But will they let her?
Will they allow her to exist on her own terms?
Or will they pull her back
into the house, lock the doors,
and bomb the key.
She stands at the edge.
Afraid.
Uncertain.
The girl born in the night
whose laughter is lost
and still, dreams.
And still, she dreams.
And still, she dreams.