Henana Berjes’s War Cry: Battles, Bruises and Medals is not merely a collection of poems; it is a document of endurance, a lyrical anatomy of a woman’s unspoken struggle, and a fierce hymn of survival. These poems do not whisper—they tremble, bleed, and blossom all at once. Berjes speaks from the heart of every woman who has fought invisible wars within the walls of her own home, beneath the quiet masks of motherhood, amid the unacknowledged fatigue of domestic rituals, and within the silent resilience that sustains both life and love. Her poetry is neither ornamental nor detached; it is grounded in the palpable texture of daily existence—work, fatigue, motherhood, betrayal, forgiveness—yet it rises above the ordinary into something luminous, even sacred. The voice that emerges from these poems is at once tender and tempestuous, vulnerable yet invincible—a woman who has been hurt into poetry and strengthened by her wounds.
There is something startling about the directness of Henana Berjes’s expression. She does not veil her emotions behind complex metaphors or classical allusions; instead, she uses the language of life itself—simple, stripped of artifice, yet profoundly poetic in its honesty. Her verse moves freely, unconfined by metre or rhyme, echoing the rhythm of natural speech. This is poetry that lives and breathes like the woman who writes it. It does not conform to the mechanical boundaries of form; rather, it flows in the organic pulse of the heart. Each line reads like an exhalation, an act of release, as if the poet is purging the accumulated pain of centuries of silence.
In “Rent”, one of the most striking poems of the collection, Berjes encapsulates the double life that countless women live—one of necessity and one of yearning. “In silence I bleed poems. Loudly, I work my shift.” The juxtaposition between silence and sound, poetry and work, reveals the duality of a woman’s world. On one side is labour—the relentless grind that sustains her household, that “feeds my kids.” On the other is art—a secret offering to her own soul, “just a gift,” as she humbly calls it. Yet even as she gifts her art to the world, she knows the world does not repay it: “And gifts don’t pay the rent.” The line resounds with quiet rebellion, a truth spoken with devastating simplicity. This is Berjes’s genius—her ability to compress oceans of meaning into the stillness of a few words. The poem becomes a mirror to every woman artist torn between survival and self-expression, between economic reality and creative impulse. It is both personal and universal, intimate and political, and therein lies its poetic brilliance.
If “Rent” exposes the economic and emotional fissures of womanhood, “You Numbered My Womb” lays bare its physical and spiritual devastations. It arrives like a scar—quiet but unforgettable. Here, Berjes catalogues the degradations inflicted upon a woman’s body and soul—childbirth, abortion, abuse, trauma—each one reduced to a number in the cruel arithmetic of patriarchy. “Your math skills were good. Now better. Please… teach me to count backwards.” The closing line is an act of rebellion disguised as surrender. To count backwards is to unlearn conditioning, to reverse the damage, to reclaim the body from its history. The poem becomes a metaphor for reclaiming agency—the poet’s body, once counted and categorized, becomes uncountable again. Its pain cannot be tabulated, its dignity cannot be measured. The womb becomes both battlefield and altar—the place where life begins and where endurance is continually tested. Berjes transforms it from a biological fact into a spiritual symbol, making it the heart of her war cry—the site of both creation and rebellion.
Her voice in “In My Dreams” then turns inward, tracing the contours of loneliness that inhabit the most ordinary spaces of life. She builds her imagery from the mundane—“open laptops,” “credit limits,” “cloistered spaces”—the clutter of modern existence that has replaced warmth with functionality. Yet within these cold frames of daily life, she inserts a trembling wish: “I wish someday, when I wake up, there would be a smile on me—of someone holding.” The longing here is not for grandeur but for intimacy, for the human touch that redeems the exhaustion of routine. The final plea, “Tell me, I’m a woman,” carries an ache so subtle yet so piercing that it transforms the poem into a cry of identity. It is not a question; it is a rediscovery—the poet reclaiming her womanhood from the confines of duty, asking the world to see her not as a machine of service but as a soul capable of tenderness.
If there is one poem in War Cry that embodies both the grace and gravity of Berjes’s poetic heart, it is “As I Love You.” It is a mother’s hymn, composed not in the language of sentimentality but of sacrifice. “I love you—all mothers do,” she begins, as though confessing something ordinary, before deepening it into something extraordinary: “But I love you more than most, ‘cause I’ve loved you through bits of me… tiny wounds no one could see.” The invisible wounds of motherhood—the exhaustion, the self-effacement, the silent nights of worry—are all gathered in these lines. Her love becomes elemental, a force of nature that endures “storms, and droughts, and rains.” There is in this poem both the sanctity and the sorrow of giving. It is the kind of love that consumes but never complains, that gives without demanding acknowledgment. Berjes’s portrayal of motherhood restores to it its ancient divinity while also exposing its human cost. She writes not from myth but from memory, not from reverence but from experience—and that makes her poetry sacred in its truth.
The motif of betrayal, a recurrent current in her work, finds searing embodiment in “Sacrilege.” Here, love and faith converge only to be violated. “I was a promise… and I thought you’d uphold. But it’s broken.” The rawness of confession is soon elevated into the realm of the spiritual: “I built a temple upon a hollowed crevice… You didn’t just rip me apart… you committed sacrilege.” The metaphor transforms betrayal into blasphemy; the personal wound becomes a desecration of the divine. In Berjes’s world, love is not a casual affair—it is a sacred covenant, and its breach is not merely heartbreak but spiritual devastation. Her diction is stark and deliberate; every word carries the weight of experience, every pause feels like a prayer interrupted. Through this poem, Berjes turns her pain into a form of worship—wounded, yet worshipful.
That same sanctity finds another home in “This House,” a poem that documents the unnoticed labours of domesticity. “I scrub the floors, you leave mud marks. I run errands, you gaze at stars.” The rhythmic symmetry of these lines makes the imbalance of gendered work all the more striking. Her tone is not bitter but weary; not accusatory, but awakening. The poem unfolds like a day in the life of a woman whose efforts remain unseen yet whose strength holds the world together. “I cannot do, can’t do it all. But I don’t want this house to fall.” In that one line lies the essence of Berjes’s woman—she endures not because she is weak, but because she knows what falling apart would mean. It is the poetry of silent heroism, the kind that history rarely records but humanity always depends upon.
Berjes’s emotional geography extends beyond the domestic. In “Take Me Whole,” her tone sharpens into defiance. Here, she challenges the selective affection that demands beauty without baggage, presence without past. “You want me like a lakeside picnic. You don’t want a trip to the ruins.” The image captures an entire philosophy of relationships in a single stroke. The poet refuses to be loved in fragments. “You want me in… You take me whole.” It is both ultimatum and liberation, a reclamation of wholeness from a world that prefers women in halves. The poem blazes with the fire of self-assertion—it is not the war cry of anger, but the war cry of dignity.
The emotional tempo softens in “The Brush,” a poem of remarkable restraint and tragic beauty. Forgiveness here is not a virtue easily granted but a discipline cultivated over years: “I painted forgiveness… in tiny strokes… over twenty long years.” The metaphor of art becomes a meditation on endurance, on the patient labour of healing. Yet the effort proves futile: “The bristles have come off… no paint left in the palette.” The devastating confession—“the brush was in a toddler’s hands”—transforms forgiveness into misplaced faith. What she thought was a masterpiece was only a child’s scribble. There is no bitterness here, only revelation—the painful wisdom of wasted compassion.
Few poems capture the mechanisation of modern womanhood as hauntingly as “Rustproof.” “I was born a woman. You turned me into a robot.” The metaphor is simple, almost brutal. She drags her “mechanical body to bed,” unable to remember what rest feels like. Yet even this metal form feels pain, even this automaton weeps. “How can a metal box feel pain? I wonder. But the tears are real.” The poem stands as a haunting allegory for women whose lives have been reduced to function, whose feelings are dismissed as inefficiency. The final line, “And I don’t gather rust,” reclaims dignity from despair—she may be mechanised, but she will not corrode. Her endurance, paradoxically, becomes her humanity.
From this darkness emerges one of the most luminous poems of the collection—“My Own Love Story.” It is the poet’s anthem of resurrection, her act of crowning herself queen after a lifetime of servitude. “I hugged the parts of me… that were never hugged right.” With each line, she reclaims what the world took from her—confidence, hope, self-worth. She “crafted flowers from the letters I never sent,” turning loss into art. “Wore my hope like a medal in war,” she declares, returning to the book’s title. Here, love is no longer something to receive but something to embody. It is the most triumphant moment in her poetic journey—a coronation of selfhood emerging from ruins. “Found me a crown… I named a kingdom.” The metamorphosis is complete—the wounded becomes warrior, the survivor sovereign.
If “My Own Love Story” is her declaration of self, “Do Not Die” is her declaration of life. The poem reads like a manifesto for existence—a call to live fearlessly, sensually, fully. Each stanza is a commandment of joy: “Do not die with a story in your heart. Live it.” “Do not die without dancing in the summer rain. Feel it.” There is something Whitmanesque about the vitality of this poem—its belief that life itself is art, that experience is the only immortality worth seeking. Amid poems that speak of pain, this one blossoms like an oasis of light, reaffirming that even within ruins, the human spirit can still choose delight.
And yet, Berjes does not end on ease. “War Declared” returns her to confrontation. The poem is brief but thunderous: “The day you declared a war on me… was the day you lost it.” The poet transforms victimhood into victory—not through revenge, but through revelation. True strength, she suggests, does not announce itself; it is realised in silence, long after the battle seems over.
What makes Henana Berjes’s poetry remarkable is that she writes from within experience, not about it. Her poems do not observe pain from a distance; they inhabit it, breathe through it, and transcend it. Her method is one of distilled truth—paring language down to its essence until only emotion remains. She does not write in the tradition of ornate metaphor; her power lies in clarity. Yet beneath her simplicity lies a profound symbolic universe. The house, the brush, the robot, the rent, the womb—all become recurring emblems of womanhood in its many manifestations. Her poetry could be described as domestic mysticism—finding the sacred within the ordinary, divinity within the daily act of survival.
There is also a quiet music in her diction, a rhythm arising not from rhyme but from breath. Each line breaks where the heart would pause. She understands the power of silence as deeply as that of speech. The ellipses, the unfinished phrases, the hesitant pauses—all carry emotional weight, evoking the rhythm of thought itself. This is not poetry seeking perfection; it seeks presence. And that is perhaps its greatest strength.
In War Cry: Battles, Bruises and Medals, Henana Berjes gives language to what has long remained unsaid. She becomes the voice of a million women who have endured quietly, loved beyond measure, forgiven beyond reason, and rebuilt themselves in the shadows. Her poems are not laments but revelations—not of weakness, but of monumental strength hidden in tenderness. Each poem is both bruise and medal—a scar that shines.
In the final reckoning, War Cry stands as testimony to a woman’s spiritual journey through the trenches of life. Its wars are not fought with swords but with silence; its victories are not celebrated with trumpets but with tears that refuse to fall unseen. Henana Berjes’s poetry is the sound of that silence breaking—the moment when endurance becomes expression, when bruises become badges, and when the human heart, in all its fragility, declares itself unconquered.
War Cry is thus not just a title—it is a metaphor for womanhood itself: the cry that births life, defends love, bears pain, and yet rises undefeated. From the sacred depth of the womb to the defiant echo of her voice, the circle completes itself—creation and resistance become one. In that eternal rhythm, Berjes reminds us that every woman carries within her both the wound and the weapon, both the cradle and the war cry. Every scar, therefore, is not a mark of defeat but a medal of divine endurance—and every heartbeat, a whisper of victory.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Sanjay Pandita is a Poet, columnist, critical analyst, can be reached at sanjaypanditasp@gmail.com