Woman with Verve: Sukirtharani, Poet

Nature’s fountainhead

Say you bury me alive.

I will become a green grass-field

and lie outspread, a fertile land.

You may set me on fire;

I will become a flaming bird

and fly about in the wide, wide space.

You may wave a magic wand

and shut me up, a genie in a bottle;

I will vaporize as mercury

and stand upright towards the sky.

You may dissolve me into the wind

like water immersed into water;

from its every direction

I will emerge, like blown breath.

You may frame me, like a picture,

and hang me on your wall;

I will pour down, away past you,

like a river in sudden flood.

I myself will become

earth

fire

sky

wind

water.

The more you confine me, the more I will spill over,

Nature’s fountainhead.

What a powerful poem. Guerilla-like, the poet escapes her jailors. The poem has a fluid, surreal elusiveness quality.

A Tamil poet, Sukirtharani is a Dalit and an eco-feminist. Holmström describes Sukirtharani as one who seeks "an infant language with all the rough and physical reality of new birth, sticky with blood."

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