Two Poems by Prithvijeet Sinha

 

TELL HER

 

Hold me dearly

even when your heart is filled to the very end of the brimming zeitgeist,

with grief and hate for the skin that shows up to be savaged by millenniums.

The pickets and batons can never shield us from the rain of tear gas,

and the strain that comes with turning from brown to black to purple within mere seconds,

is a deluge that fills the heart first and then blows up our eye sockets.

As the levee breaks forth,

the pressure of identity is screened for filling up empty forms, empty shells and haunted cells.

 

But promises break,

a mother breaks,

losing one eye to the mob

and the other to the foreseeable spokes of this revolution.

The golden jubilee of the Alabama walk is rehearsed,

in front of her daughter 

and the spirit howls and breaks into umpteenth solo dreams,

amongst the same faces she grew up with.

 

Hold her dearly, your only girl.

she has been cursed as the demon child

and demonstrated as the last in line.

Words she should never learn in class,

especially not on the streets.

Hold her close, 

tight as a fist in a burning hand,

just below the flags.

Look out for her distracted mind 

and the surly weather of protests.

Take her name as she drowns among the crowd.

Tell her, most patiently, 

you love her,

this is for her to see,

what she will only grow to watch from the intimacy of her skin

and the proximity with which her destiny in this country calls her,

towards rivers, swamps and bayous to wade through,

neighbourhoods to traverse and antebellum sores to check,

and the barks of her family trees now become twigs up for fire.

 

Hold her close,

tell her why you need to proffer this cry for justice,

march with the millions and stand up to the charged batons and wounds of race.

 

Pray silently that nobody falls,

pray intently that no spray of bullets rains down on her

and still visualize that if she trips and falls,

waylaid by the hoots and cries at the top of their lungs, 

a burnt out rose atleast is readily in someone's hands,

to offer to the disappearance of her tiny landscapes 

and the book of psalms that dictated the way to heaven and hell.

 

Tell her then,

to be on her guard.

Tell her then to pray to the Lord.

 

Tell her,

today her life is an act of salvaging luck and teeming with seething rage and anger

and to disappear into these glorious masses,

crying FREEDOM TO TRUTH,

TRUTH TO FREEDOM.

 

NOTE : this is a poem that the writer based on the righteous urge for addressing racial injustice, especially in the wake of George Floyd's death. 

 

 

SHE ONCE BLOOMED LIKE THE DAISY

 

She once bloomed like the daisy,

growing up with pride and veiled hatred for overt prejudice,

picking up the truth that too much of it, 

would cost her dear life perhaps.

 

Purity of emotion was of the essence to her,

and from among the names of her soul sisters,

her fathers gave her the one she and every girl is born to flower into:

RENAISSANCE.

 

A mob once descended upon her,

just by the alley she crossed everyday to school.

A rumbling of the senses drawing blood from that interstice,

steeling her for the first few minutes against the hatred from men,

her eyes pulped from the shock to the system

and her gut crashing with the last charge.

 

She withered with the lost blood then and there.

But stood up.

Running riot against the diplomacy of denial and patriarchy.

 

They laughed at her,

calling her a doe-eyed cat fit to lick her wounds clean. 

 

But an absence of speech is a powerful call for action

and Renaissance disappeared into the good night to say her only words,

 

'I will destroy you,

with the emblazoning crust of my gender,

I will destroy you,

with the solidarity of my sisters'

 

She bloomed red, 

rage and potent anger living off her sisters,

growing with pride and subsumed by myths and folklores, 

to the point of legend.

Till infernal truth burned red upon the men like cinder

and the massacre of patriarchy was etched by the alley, 

on the block.

 

She then bloomed like the dervish woman rising against the blood moon,

whom the city proclaimed RENAISSANCE.

 

The writer's name is PRITHVIJEET SINHA from Lucknow, India, a proud member of the faculty of ENGLISH AND MODERN EUROPEAN LANGUAGES, LUCKNOW UNIVERSITY . He is a post graduate in MPhil, having launched his writing career by self publishing on the worldwide community Wattpad since 2015 and on his WordPress blog AN AWADH BOY'S PANORAMA besides having his works published in several varied publications as GNOSIS JOURNAL, READER'S DIGEST, CAFE DISSENSUS EVERYDAY, CAFE DISSENSUS MAGAZINE, CONFLUENCE, THE MEDLEY, THUMBPRINT MAGAZINE, WILDA MORRIS' POETRY BLOG, SCREEN QUEENS, BORDERLESS JOURNAL , LOTHLORIEN JOURNAL, LIVEWIRE encompassing various genres of writing, from poetry to film reviews, travel pieces, photo essays to posts on culture . His life force resides in writing.

 

His two poems DREAMS and WISH UPON A STAR have recently been published and released as part of the children's anthology titled NURSERY RHYMES AND CHILDREN'S POEMS FROM AROUND THE WORLD YOU MAY NOT HAVE HEARD, edited by ANITA NAHAL and MEENAKSHI MOHAN.