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Let us gather together, women, even if in our own homes, and take back the freedom we all were denied by the violence upon us.
(A poem loosely inspired by or based on the poem of resistance and empowerment titled ‘Still I Rise’ penned by Maya Angelou, which I intend to share with fellow poets, humanists, and with all my women comrades in the month of March, the phenomenal #WomensHistoryMonth)
Let’s talk about a prayer of a clear, azure sky After explosives have burnt and exhausted themselves in the streets.
Let’s read ‘Still I Rise’, the fiery utterances Of a burnt out poet after our darkest dreams With their dead limbs and hands, return to their shivering abyss.
Let’s free the landscape of our desires, exploding into screams While in the deep, dark grave of our yesteryears Primordial venom of oppression writhes, burns.
Let’s adopt, steal, borrow the unwritten manuscripts Of our violated kith and kin, and eulogize them, Let the countercurrent of our scribbled verses Settle in our skins, boiling like ‘resistance’.
Let’s rain like adamant cloudburst, Descending on flooded rivers on a high tide night.
With the deep, dark rain poems we bleed, The muddy river bank finds solace in chaos.
Hope encircles the nakedness, growing Like an undying flame as pyres burn, Dark graves are laid to rest.
Let’s warm the pulse of hope even as our embers die out, Surreptitiously, unannounced.
Image source: pixabay
Lopa Banerjee is an author, editor, translator and faculty of Creative Writing at Richland College, Dallas, Texas, USA, but originally from Kolkata, India. Her memoir 'Thwarted Escape: An Immigrant's Wayward Journey' and her debut read more...
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There are many mountains I need to climb just to be, just to live my life, just to have my say... because they are mountains you've built to oppress women.
Trigger Warning: This deals with various kinds of violence against women including rape, and may be triggering for survivors.
I haven’t climbed a literal mountain yet Was busy with the metaphorical ones – born a woman Fighting for the air that should have come free And I am one of the privileged ones, I realize that
Yet, if I get passionate, just like you do I will pay for it – with burden, shame, – and possibly a life to carry So, my mountains are the laws you overturn My mountains are the empty shelves where there should have been pills
When people picked my dadi to place her on the floor, the sheet on why she lay tore. The caretaker came to me and said, ‘Just because you touched her, one of the men carrying her lost his balance.’
The death of my grandmother shattered me. We shared a special bond – she made me feel like I was the best in the world, perfect in every respect.
Apart from losing a person who I loved, her death was also a rude awakening for me about the discrimination women face when it comes to performing the last rites of their loved ones.
On January 23 this year, I lost my 95 year old grandmother (dadi) Nirmala Devi to cardiac arrest. She was that one person who unabashedly praised me. The evening before her death she praised the tea I had made and said that I make better tea than my brother (my brother and I are always competing about who makes the best chai).
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