Chioma Ibekwe’s “Eyes of Blades” takes on one of the most difficult subjects a poet can approach, female genital cutting, and does so with a controlled, elegiac restraint that serves the material well.
The poem builds its case through extended metaphor, moving steadily from agricultural imagery (the field, the garden, the weeds) to architectural and sacred imagery (the house, the temple) to arboreal imagery (the root, the tree, the branches).
This procession of metaphors is the poem’s central structural achievement, and it largely succeeds: each image reframes the girl’s body as something whole, cultivated, and holy, standing in direct opposition to the practice the poem condemns.
The title itself is worth pausing on. “Eyes of Blades” is a startling, almost surreal pairing, fusing the organ of witness with the instrument of harm. It suggests a gaze that cuts, a way of seeing girls that is itself a kind of violence, watching them not as whole beings but as sites to be corrected.
That tension between seeing and cutting never appears explicitly in the body of the poem, which makes the title function almost as a frame placed around the piece from outside it, an interpretive lens rather than a line drawn from the text itself.
The poem is built from nine rhyming couplets, mostly in a loose iambic tetrameter orbpentameter, which gives it the cadence of proverb or elegy, appropriate for a subject so often discussed, when discussed at all, in the hushed register of communal grief.
The AABB rhyme scheme is unrelenting, almost incantatory, which suits the poem’s tonal ambition: this reads like public address, something meant to be spoken aloud at a vigil or a rally rather than encountered silently on a page. That’s a legitimate and often powerful choice for advocacy poetry, though it comes with a cost I’ll return to below.
The poem’s strongest moments come when it commits fully to a single image rather than accumulating new ones. The line comparing the aftermath to “a map made of pain” is the poem’s most original and devastating image. It does the work that good metaphor should do, taking something abstract (grief, trauma) and making it suddenly, uncomfortably concrete, while also gesturing at the idea of the body as territory, something charted and claimed by others.
Similarly, the shift from “root” to “whole tree” in the couplet about severing is effective because it insists on interconnection; the cutting becomes a wound to an entire living system, felt well
beyond the single act described. That’s the poem’s ethical argument made through form, and it’s the strongest writing here.
Where the poem is less successful is in its accumulation of near synonymous metaphors without always letting one breathe before introducing the next. Field, garden, house, temple, tree: each is a reasonable vehicle for the poem’s argument, but stacked together across only 18 lines, they begin to compete rather than compound. A reader has to do quite a lot of metaphorical re-orientation in a short space, and by the closing couplets, when the poem asks us to “protect the young branches,” we’ve already left the tree image behind for temple and house, and the return feels slightly unmoored rather than cyclical.
The poem’s diction leans heavily on the abstract and the sacral, “grace,” “holy,” “spirit,” “heavens”, which gives it a hymn-like solemnity but occasionally tips into the generic. Phrases like the body being “a house built of grace” or a girl being “designed by the heavens” are lovely in isolation, but they’re also the kind of imagery that could appear in many different devotional or advocacy poems on many different subjects.
The poem’s specific images, the blade, the sheet, the silence where “joy held its spark”, carry far more particularity than its universal, borrowed religious language.”But the blade does not bless; it is theft in the dark. / It leaves a deep silence where joy held its spark.” The first line earns its keep through the plain contradiction of “bless” and “theft,” a pairing that does more moral work than any amount of direct statement could.
The second line is the poem’s quietest and best: “where joy held its spark” trusts the reader to feel the absence rather than being told to grieve it, and the internal near-rhyme of “held” and “spark” gives the line a held breath before it lets go.
“The blood on the sheet is a map made of pain, / a grief that no custom or time can explain.”
This is the poem’s finest couplet. “A map made of pain” turns evidence into geography, suggesting a territory the girl will carry and navigate for the rest of her life. The second line then refuses the two justifications most often offered for the practice, custom and the passage of time, and dismisses both in a single clean stroke without raising its voice.
“To sever the root is to wound the whole tree, / to shackle the spirit that was born to be free.”
The couplet’s strength is in its proportion: a single cut is measured against an entire organism, which is exactly the ethical claim the poem is making about the relationship between an individual harm and a whole life. “Shackle” is doing quiet, deliberate work too, reaching past the immediate image of cutting toward a second, older register of bondage.
“But a girl is a temple, complete from her birth/designed by the heavens to walk on this earth.”
Here the poem’s rhetoric turns from indictment to blessing, and the word “complete” is the couplet’s real achievement. It answers the poem’s opening metaphor of the girl as a field that “must be cleared,” insisting that nothing about her was ever unfinished or in need of correction to begin with.
This is a poem that knows exactly what register it wants, public, incantatory, morally unambiguous, and largely achieves it.
Its ambition slightly outpaces its economy; a tighter selection of two or three sustained metaphors would likely hit harder than the current five competing ones. Its central image, the “map made of pain,” along with its root and tree metaphor for bodily and communal wholeness, is strong enough to anchor the piece and justify its more familiar, hymn adjacent language elsewhere.
As a piece of advocacy poetry meant to be heard, it makes an atrocity legible as loss, and its title, “Eyes of Blades,” lingers afterward as the sharpest image the piece offers, even though it never quite steps into the poem itself.