Insomnia is usually a private complaint, something you mention over breakfast. Lydie Toure's poem turns it into evidence against a whole world. "There are women who cry / Late at night" sounds almost like the opening of a report, and the phrase "There are women" returns twice more, each time widening the picture: those who cannot sleep, those who sleep through "the same thunders," those who "fight alone." Their sufferings look different on the surface, yet the poem insists they are "All the same struggle / Of womanhood."
The first section works by turning familiar words against themselves. "Night owls" is normally a cheerful label for people who stay up by choice, but set between crying and wishing "to die," it turns bitterly ironic. Then comes "Can't close their eyes, / Ever. / Never will sleep again." "Ever" is stranded on its own line, and "Never" answers it at once, two words that echo each other in sound and in hopelessness. The thought circles back on itself, much as a sleepless mind does. Nightmares and "the reality of world" are placed side by side, so waking offers no escape, and the clipped phrasing makes reality sound blunt and unsoftened.
The sharpest moment is "Guilty of the crime / Of not being a man." The vocabulary is legal, but the "crime" is a state of being rather than an act. The line hangs without a firm grammatical anchor, so the accusation floats over every woman mentioned. That suits its point: the guilt is assigned by the world, not earned.
What follows is more unsettling than comforting. The "luckier ones" are only luckier, not lucky, and what they do is sleep "through the same thunders." Thunder suggests something loud, external and unavoidable, so their sleep reads less like peace than like endurance, or perhaps numbness. Then a lone "Oh" breaks in, the speaker's sigh, the one point where the voice seems to give way. "All against one of these ladies" can be read as the whole weight of the world lined up against each individual woman. It seems to turn "all for one" upside down, though that is an inference rather than something the poem states.
The real pivot is in the pronouns. The poem begins in the third person ("women," "their"), then narrows to a single "her fight," then jumps to "ours," "my fights," "yours," and finally "I." Each step pulls the reader closer. "Should have been ours" and "Should be yours too" are moral claims, not observations, and the second one points directly at whoever is reading. The phrase "I am a lot of us" is the oddest and best line. A speaker would normally say "one of us," but here the lone "I" is a crowd, a voice that carries many women inside it.
There is no regular metre and no end rhyme. Short lines, plain speech and, above all, the staggered indentation do the work instead. "Ever" and "Oh" drift to the right, and the page looks hesitant and broken, like speech interrupted by tears or breath. Because the poem stays so loose, the sound patterning at the end stands out. "Surviving" and "Thriving" nearly rhyme, and "alone" chimes with "whole," so the closing lines are the most musical in the poem. After all that fragmentation, the language itself seems to knit together. The word "soon" keeps the promise honest, though: survival is the present condition, and thriving "as a whole" is still ahead.
That is where the poem's significance lies. Describing women's pain is the easier task. The harder one is to say that it is a shared responsibility, and to do so in a voice that moves from "they" to "I" to "you" until the reader can no longer watch from a safe distance. The poem leaves its audience with a question as much as a message: when "her fight / Should have been ours," what are we doing about it?