Rapes —
How many a day?
How many a week?
How many a year?
The victim stays till
Doused with kerosene and burnt
The victim stays till
Pelted with stones and killed
The victim stays till
Lynched by mobs to death
Twelve or twenty-three,
What was their fault?
Being a woman?
Beasts drawn by untasted flesh
Tempted by images drawn in unkempt brains
No longer men but La Manada or Tom Dooleys
Hang down you head
Justice evades.
We all know She is blind.
Rape remains untried
Or the Victim Dies
Why is it on the rise?
Lust gives way to homicide
Coiled within societal norms
The snakes lie dormant till
Drawn by Porn-educated Adams
They asphyxiate and kill
Change the way they think
Change the way they grow
Change the way we live
Hang down your head and think.
Mitali Chakravarty’s poetry has been published online and as part of anthologies, Harbinger Asylum Quarterly (November, 2019), In Reverie (2016), An Anthology of Indian Poetry in English (1984). Some of her poetry has recently been translated to German. Mitali herself translates from Bengali and Hindi to English. She has published a humorous book of essays on living in China where she spent eight years, In the Land of Dragons (2014). She had numerous bylines in The Times of India, The Hindustan Times and The Statesman in the 1980s up to 1992 and more recently online on Kitaab.org, Countercurrent, Modern Literature, Words and Worlds and The Daily Star (Bangladesh). This April, she joined kitaab.org as the editor. She blogs at 432m.wordpress.com.
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