By
K. Niveditha
My mother's skin feels like cardboard on somedays and like her cashew kheer on others.
But my father's is a torn paper everyday and people tell me,
it's on paper that they write birth certificates
while kheer is just a memory, like a handshake
given at birth to remember your existence is beautiful.
Women were created to be the ocean,
men were created to be the sun.
One always drained the other while
one always tried reaching it back.
I see the burning signs of revolution
in every milk boiled beyond its bowl,
in every maternity leave ending in cages,
in each pregnancy conceived before
a Nobel prize dream;
women dream, they mutter in voices as normal as
the lashing waves during a flood: but we don't hear them.
We don't hear them because we are afraid,
we don't hear them because for every woman shouting
there's a man already shutting out the noise,
we don't hear them because men are the sun,
women are the ocean and light has always
been faster than sound.
~ always.