killinochchi town getting ready…
may 2010

19th may. you have nothing
to say? i can only
falteringly
mouth, nothing of ….
nothing begets nothing, a king says, and
launches a war
against garrulous daughters and sulking ones;
and i think of an
other daughter, too too loud or too soft,
of other wars and other deaths, slipped between
a pillow and its case, a letter, a bomb, a whisper, slipped
between the familiar and the family, the nation and its engender.

on 19th may, 1991, sivaramani,
took her own positive life, her cry strangled
with that strenuous cord, blazing a trail of blood
of the nation and its many stories;
300, 000 slipped between
a miserable soul-dead wretch, who
would not take his life and the dark
of a storm shelling sky, a black and blue sea,
dotted with doom, a king
without daughters striking those
‘[trojans =delete] crushed between sea and sky’,
a tale slipped between waiting and waking,
an impossible 30-years;
18 years later.

*sivaramani the poet committed suicide in 1991, after burning to cinders much of her poetry, a few days before dhanu detonated herself to annihilate rajiv gandhi. though translated much and celebrated as an activist and a woman poet, the significance of her incisive and multi faceted critique of the nation is rarely spoken of.

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