Women’s Web is saying Goodbye! Please make sure you read this important notification.
Read me whole, read my light and intense parts, read me as you find me ugly and lopsided and crazy and magnificent all at once, read my discarded heaps of scraps even as in your conscience, you crave to wash down, unlearn the lessons of my body.
Do you desire to read me, sitting on my boughs, my bark, my branches, stubbornly, tenaciously clinging to me?
Do you desire to read my verses, lyrics of my angel choirs?
Well then, read me at your will, construct and deconstruct my lissome letters, words, fragments, ravaging them, wreaking havoc on them, penetrating their volatile contours.
In this night garden of your throbbing wants, cut open my roots—violet, indigo, red, magenta and fire, and leave the imprints of your bleeding lips.
Cut open my roots as you spread your wrath and venom on me, curse me with your hissing prose and brisk rhyme, but still, read me.
Read my crimson tales, my perforated core, grant me immortality as you still read me.
At the end of it all, why do I see you then, prostrate at my feet, your lofty head drooped at the edge of my arms in inevitable surrender?
What did you see in the quiet, subterranean flow of my gestating words? Did you read it all, and become a fallen human, like me?
Well, no, trees are felled, women are rendered fallen, maimed, but men, the rest of humanity stay static and true, true to the volumes of history and myths written on the landscapes of time, true to your flesh, bone, blood and soul.
Read me, still, dark and barbarian at one end and opaque, marble-white at the other end.
Read me till the end of time, till the apocalypse of the sexes lets you construct and deconstruct me in lust, passion, anger, domination, subservience. Read me, till there is nothing left to collapse, to incubate, to germinate.
Image source: filadendron via Getty Images signature, free on Canva Pro
[A version of this monologue or prose-poem has been performed by the author in a QPOC (Queer People of Colour) Open Mic Poetry forum at Dallas Central Library, Texas and also, later, published in her collaborative book of poems and essays titled ‘We Are What We Are: Primal Songs of Ethnicity, Gender & Identity’, co-authored with Priscilla Rice, 2022.]
Lopamudra Banerjee is an author, poet, translator, editor with eight published books and six anthologies in fiction, nonfiction and poetry. She has been a featured multicultural woman poet at Rice University, Houston, USA in 2019 read more...
Women's Web is an open platform that publishes a diversity of views, individual posts do not necessarily represent the platform's views and opinions at all times.
Stay updated with our Weekly Newsletter or Daily Summary - or both!
Please enter your email address