Does it have to be this way?

Poem Untitled
- Sumangala's mother
(trans. from Pali by Willis Barnstone)

A free woman. At last free!
Free from slavery in the kitchen
where I walked back and forth stained
and squalid among cooking pots.
My brutal husband ranked me lower
than the shade he sat in.
Purged of anger and the body's hunger,
I live in meditation
in my own shade from a broad tree.
I am at ease.

Aint' I A Woman! A Book of Woman's poetry From Around the World, Edited by Illona Linthwaite.