I am not yet dead; un-touch me.
Let not the bees or the rats
Or the sunken darts loot our pollen.
I am not yet dead; adhere me.
I wish that the Mother with tall wrinkled trunk talks me,
With branches of feathers, with breeze of chill blanket me,
On the green river rise me,
In the earthen bath bake me.
I am not yet dead; ear out me.
With the unsung chirpings, the unseen peaker’s craft,
Snakes forgotten scales left back, to dry,
Decay and buried undesired.
Howl’s the echoes of fallen ears out.
I am not yet dead; amidst unseen existence of me.
For the blood in me the State shall see,
My eyes when they point me,
My letters when they note me,
My identity exist in the ruled lines of sectioned ink.
Stamped and sealed with the print of unspoken words,
With the lost statistics never mentioned the graved ones.
I am not yet dead; hunt the nameless-ness within me.
In the land I must grow and the shelter under which I just have taken rest
When the sun strikes notch of the hills
Looted and shredded down,
And hackled me to be born with a sound.
The bureaucrats trapped me
And laughed when tried to talk
The long pointed nose of those skin shades
Pun upon the nameless-ness of graven dens.
I am not yet dead; call name of me.
I was born during festival of Holi,
So I was called Phagonia (the month in which Holi is celebrated)
I was born tall,
So I was called lambu ( hindi word for a person who is tall)
I was born when flowers bloomed in my yard,
So I was named pholia ( flower)
I was born on a Saturday and my mother passed away while giving birth,
So I was named sanichara ( inauspicious).
I am not yet dead, hear me.
I climb the core of the cracking peddles
Like the arms of hours about to meet
But they dive and uncovered my skies
They came and un-wheeled my chain
And named me upon there dead tails.
Scratched my walls and altered my dates
And name the days that,
Never floats in my veins.
My being was coloured,
Which was alien to me.
The crucified wooden idols
Where hanged upon the walls
And the wood was taken from
Our half trunk-en God.
The Joseph, Merry, John
All named from a foreign land.
The un- earthen soil was stamped upon
In name of mercy we were doomed to be aliens,
Upon the soil of one’s own.
How to get through this mystery?
How to dive in the river were we breed?
How to rewind and un-wheel the imposed History?
And palm out the graved grimmer History of one’s own.
Let’s unlearn to learn back the routes of one’s own.
As am not yet dead; rejuvenate me.
As the veins talks me to:
My rain, my land, my name, my ways.
The pebbles stones crawls back under my feet,
To strike me back to my speaking tongue.
To mark the unsung names of History to it’s being.
As am not yet dead, breathe Me.
Author- Sonali Gupta
Picture Rupert Loydell
Gumla, Jharkhand, India.
Twitter handle- https://twitter.com/_Sonali_Gupta__?t=YKEKdayvFw2N6M0QgJhWS
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Bio- Sonali Gupta has currently completed Master’s from Centre for English Studies, JNU New Delhi India. She’s a poet from Gumla district, Jharkhand,India.