We will rebuild worlds....

Once impaled for our faith

and trained to speak in voiceless whispers
we’ll implore
you to produce the list
from hallowed memories
of our people disgraced
as outcastes
degraded
as untouchable at
sixty-four feet
denied a life
and livelihood and done to death

In so many ways it would take
an encyclopedia to describe and steven-spielberg
or some-such-guy to produce the special effects for a blockbuster version
not just the stories of how
you charred to death forty-four of our men and women and children
because they asked for handfuls of rice
electrocuted children to instant death because they played in your well
and other ghastly carnages

But the crimes of passion
our passion
your crimes
poured poison and pesticide through the ears-nose-mouth
or hanged them in public
because a man and a woman dared to love
and you wanted
to teach
other boys and other girls
the lessons of
how to
whom to
when to
where to
continue their caste lines

And we will refresh your mind with other histories
of how you brutally murdered and massacred our peoples
with the smiling promise of
heaven in the next birth
and in this
a peace that
never belonged.

We will wipe away the
sham of your smiles
that appear and
disappear like commercials on prime time tv
smiles that flash across
botoxed faces
smiles that crease
plucked eyebrows
smiles that are pasted and
plastered to your lips
smiles that sell yourself
smiles that seek to
sell us into soulless worlds.

We will sing the many skins you wear to the world
the skins you change at work
the skins called castes and
skins called race
the skins you mend once a week
the skin you bought at a sale
the skin you thought was yours
the filthy rich stinking skin you thought you could retain at bed.

Shorn of style
and a hypocrisy named
sophistication
there would be nothing for you to do but gape at our combat gears.

We will learn
how to fight
with the substantial spontaneity
with which we first learnt
how to love.

So
now
upon a future time
there will be a revolution.

It will begin in our red-hot dreams that surge that
scorch that
scald that sizzle like lava
but never settle down never
pungently solidify.

It will begin
when the song in the sway
of our hips
will lead us to dance and sing
and stand up straight
put up a pretty fight

redeem and reclaim
the essence of our earth.

It will begin
as our naked bodies
held close together
like hands in prayer
against each other
like hands in prayer
set to defy the dares the
diktats the years the terms
the threats
that set us apart.

It will begin
as we give names to our children and
give names to our
inward anger and aches and
name ourselves
with words of fury
like forest fires
with the words of wrath
like stealthy wildcat eyes
that scare the cowards
in power
away.

It will begin
the way thunder rises in our throats and
we will brandish our slogans with a stormy stress and succeed
to chronicle to
convey the last stories
of our lost and scattered lives.

It will begin
when the oppressors will wince
every time they hear our voices and their sparkly silence will never be taken for a sacrament.

It will begin when never
resting we will scream
until
our uvulas tear away and
our breathless words
breathe life to the bleeding dead and in the black magic of
our momentary silences
you will hear two questions
India, what is the caste of sperm?
India, what is the cost of life?
and the rest of our words will rush
in this silenced earth
like the rage of a river in first flood.

It will begin
that day when
we will pay
all that it takes
for the dangerous price of love.

Meena Kandasamy