A voice that cannot be stifled, a protest that breaks shackles is the poetic voice of Lopamudra. Her protest poem envisions change. Here’s her firebrand poem for Different Truths.

Every single day, we gulp down stones.

Stones thrown, pelting on the Dalit, the untouchable mass,

breathing on existential ashes.

Every single day, pride of a Brahmin blood

Gnashes his teeth, burning in feudal flames.

Every single day, the deepest wells

In the widows’ eyes in Varanasi spills a silent, festering fluid.

Every single moonless night, a whore scrapes

her overused bed sheets and a wrecked vagina.

Every single moonlit night, somewhere a grown up bride,

a child bride crumbles in a marital bed,

thanking God for she is not a public woman,

for her man uses her well.

Every single day, a little girl somewhere in Bihar, in Rajasthan, in Punjab

thanks her stars that her heart is still pounding,

that her school bag still carries some crinkled books

and a nascent wish granted by a Djinn.

That she is not crushed, ripped off from her mother’s womb

like her sisters, never born.

Every single day, a farmer, a rickshaw puller

Blown away to smithereens,

And metric lines of a vain intelligentsia scream: CHANGE.

Let Change be the one bruised stroke that catches flame.

Let Change not be a mere saffron glint of words and hope,

lubricating our parched voices.

Is the world ready for the shame, the horror of change?

Does the world lament when the froth dies, and resurfaces?

Let change be the dark corridor

where scriptures and psalms burn in their clamorous fire,

And all that remains is an endless thirst,

Thirst of the bone, sinew and blood,

Thirst of a morphed, ‘work-in- progress’ universe.

©Lopamudra Banerjee

Photo from the internet.

Lopamudra Banerjee

Lopamudra Banerjee is a multi-talented author, poet, translator, and editor with eight published books and six anthologies in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. She has been a featured poet at Rice University, Houston (2019), ‘Life in Quarantine’, the Digital Humanities Archive of Stanford University, USA. Her recent translations include 'Bakul Katha: Tale of the Emancipated Woman' and 'The Bard and his Sister-in-law'.

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