Don't tell me her name

Published Below is the Poem Shared by Poetess Usha Kishore from Isle of Man

(For the anonymous Indian women,
whose defiled and burned bodies
form a daily news item in the media}




Don’t tell me her name.
Let me cry for her,
let me cry for me
for I am woman born.

Let me map
my plagued body
in bruises, in burns,
in the stench
of kerosene,
in the fumes
of poison,
in the agony
of a defiled soul.

Let me write my body,
drowned in milk; my body
plucked, torn asunder
from my mother’s womb,
gasping for breath;
my body, torn apart for sins
of womb and breast.

Let me write a glorious
Motherland, where
inglorious women writhe.
Do I weep for myself
for I am lost hope, beating
my weathered bosom
in the annals of history?

Or do I write myself
as Kali incarnate
trampling a nation’s shame?