Awake Poem by Saroj Padhi

You adore, worship me as a goddess
in dawns of your strange, quaint, male mood
when you feel how imperative it is to show
that you, like an angel, can be noble and good;

dispense doses of such lethal love
that obscures my embroiled self behind sun-light
inducing a life-long sleep in middle of the deep
where neither can I swim nor to the shore alight;
you drag me under veils to the slave market
where you sell my body in kilos and soul in grams
but love to sit in judgment over minor ruptures
when it comes to love and all other social shams;
you try to nip me in the bud as a fetus in the womb
and if by chance I survive, you carve my early tomb
trying to make me a handy doll, speechless and dumb
so that to your fond passions and pressures I succumb;
you employ your wit to turn my kind against myself
so that each of us perishes like a lone embattled self;
but your turn is gone, your politics is outworn
there as a new woman I'm getting born
to fight my battle for my own sake and for you as well
to open all eyes to the morass where we sadly dwell,
and to heights of a new, just civilizational joy to swell
with true love and peace for the tumult in soul to quell.