My ancestors disposed the dead
But I make my pen perform the last rites.
My ancestors made marvelous baskets
But I weave worthless words,
Half-eaten by termites.
My ancestors were denied the pen and given pyre
I come from fire, but I am nothing like my ancestry
Because they made music
But I write pain and call it poetry.
This is not written word.
It is a beaten world,
Beaten body, beaten mind, beaten heart,
Where spitting and pissing on fellow humans
Is the divine art that oppressors mastered,
To keep the lesser born fettered
By the fact that 'shit' is what they are,
Which makes me wonder what if, there was no caste?
And instead of shit, a human could be called a star.
What if there was room for Ambedkar, Phule and Periyar?
I excavate my entire existence to write a personal poem
To serve authenticity to readers reeling under reality.
But my pain refuses to identify as pain
After watching innocent men
Being gunned down in a train,
Because of the faith they followed
In a secular country.
If this life is poetry then repetition is its ugliest device,
This repetition isn't nice.
It was repetition not déjà-vu
When a teacher made small children
Slap their own classmate
Because his faith was the same
As the men murdered in the train.
My misery has now lost its brain,
It thinks it is mirth
As I was never slapped because of my birth.
This makes me wonder, what if, there was no religion?
And atleast children were allowed to remain human.
What if I confessed that I know exactly,
The futility of writing poetry
Where I keep talking of the wrongs
I cannot right
I made poems out of my mother's plight
But could not put it to an end
Women in my country are cut to bits,
Brutalized and raped every second.
Knowing that others suffer worst
How do I voice my own suffering?
The abuse, the violence, the eve-teasing.
And as I begin to think,
What if, there was no gender hierarchy?
It strikes me that that the Supreme Court said
It is not eve-teasing but 'Street Sexual Harassment'.
And I can't emphasize enough
The importance of language in oppression’s acknowledgement,
How the words we use are the vehicles of empowerment.
Hail the Supreme Court's handbook on combating gender stereotypes,
Why not learn from it the art of making wrongs right,
Why not for once be outright,
Why not try stopping this entire insanity,
Why not have a 'Handbook on Combating Inhumanity'.