Don’t cry.
Pity this nation
which knows about your medals
not your pains and wounds.
They clip your wings and celebrate
your blood spilled journey with
sugar-coated smiles.
Words are always the creations
of power –
We must remember that.
Be enraged.
Here, silence is celebrated
and the voice is always despised.
We are merely unlucky in our luck
they haven’t drowned us in milk
after our birth.
Only forty-five lakh wobbling lives
are murdered before the first cry!*
Be furious and rise
and teach them
we can wrestle our battle
and we are much more than
our uterus.
*According to an analysis of The Pew Research Centre at least 9 million girls are ‘missing’ in India as a result of female infanticide from 2000 to 2019
Moumita Alam is a poet from West Bengal. Her poetry collection, The Musings of the Dark was published in 2020. The book has about a hundred poems written in protest against the humanitarian crisis from the abrogation of article 370, the Delhi riots, and the Shaheen Bagh movement to the unbearable sufferings of the migrant labourers due to the unplanned COVID – induced lockdown.
