‘Why do we submit? / to fracturing?’: A poetry anthology of South Asian women’s traumas

White Roses

by Lopamudra Basu

Today, I click on Kolkata Gifts Online and
order thirty white roses in a vase for you.
Ma sends me the photo of the roses
and tuberoses and the jasmine garland
all adorning your face today.

Two years ago, in that May of hell’s heat and destruction
there were no garlands. Flower sellers
banished from the city like vermin thought to spread
the plague, dying of thirst on the way, walking hundreds
of miles, sometimes with no shoes

Today, life goes on as usual in New York, New Delhi
and Kolkata – do people even remember that
there was no firewood or earth to bury the dead?
No flights from Minneapolis or Chicago
not even a phone call to hear you in the hospital.

We have said often that we have to think
of it as a natural disaster, an earthquake
or a cyclone like Amphan that tore you away
Except, it was not a forest fire and more
a Chernobyl with many forewarnings.

Two years later, so many names whispered
by the wind, and so many lives like leaves
blown away. So many souls still unmourned
and some like the white roses in the vase
pressed forever in memory’s folds.

Fractured

by Feroza Jussawalla

A purple pensiveness
falls over me, as I
contemplate
fractured bodies
and purple passions.

Who will love me now,
at sixty-six,
with lumpectomied
one and half breasts
and a bulging
inguinal hernia
caused by
moving boxes
after the radical hysterectomy
of cancers past.

None will hold women
broken and fragmented,
afraid to touch
cracked glass,
like shards of crystal glassware,
resulting from being,
dropped in the deliberate abandonment
of betrayals, wrought
by those who should have loved us.

Why do we submit?
to fracturing?

Grief is too painful to contemplate
in purple pensiveness.

Can we be Kintsugi’d?
Using gold,...

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