One: Foeticide
To begin with, ignore it. Nip it in the bud.
Try telling it, it doesn’t exist and has no raison d’etre,
no hope, no need, no place in the world to keep;
that one can, as well, do without it
and that it had, wiser, quit the very idea of being born.
If it’s eagerness doesn’t cease, beat the womb to pulp
and make a grave of it for the patriarch to spit.
Two: Ostracize
If it still insists, shamelessly, on arriving, judge it.
Tell it that its shape or colour does not fit,
that it remains unsanctioned by order or creed;
that its blood, when it bleeds, is not blue;
that if met on the streets, it would be made to stoop,
to tie a broom and avoid contact with the rest.
It would be forced to look for clay cups,
to find another well, and ensure to
not cast shadows on the best.
Three: Violate
If it attempts, however, to assert itself,
tell it it’s wrong, that it’s not the way
a low-born behaves. Tell it
its mouth may be gagged, its head shaved,
its face laved generously with acid,
its skin scraped off its feet.
Warn that it may be burnt as a witch
or crumpled and left,
its vagina filled with thorns.
Four: Delegitimize
If it refuses to be cowed, take heart.
Tidy your laws, make a new start.
Summon it to prove its identity,
interrogate how its existence as a poem can be,
find what papers it has to prove its history.
Record the chronology of what its ancestors
lost in another land, on another sea
to make in this country a home.
Plague it with questions till forgetting
the colour of its faith and bread,
it becomes pale with hunger and dread.
Five: Lynch
If it keeps insisting it’s a poem and has
every right to be, don’t mind it much.
Simply place it at the centre of a vegetating crowd
programmed to hate and watch the spate
of abuses heaped upon its head.
Watch it ridiculed, fingered, pinched,
beaten, thrashed, lynched
till the poem too, like a mob, goes nameless.
Six: Send Missing
If somehow, the poem yet resists
and it’s difficult to erase it
in an accident by daylight
or smother under scrutiny of cameras at night,
get it quietly abducted.
Ensure it is traceless, missing, gone,
mysterious, strong in its disappearance.
Let the world wildly look for it
till it admits defeat
and till memory too forgets
that a poem ever was.
Postscript: Caution
Note, however, that poems resurrect,
god-like, almost always after death;
that they in fact do not die
but like the shadow of a lie,
arrive steadfastly to rake the truth;
that they penetrate through miasmas
to haunt dreams, minds, books;
that they are chasmophytic and can grow
in crevices, fissures, rocks
and that, when they knock,
they fearlessly lay open graves.
Basudhara Roy teaches English at Karim City College and writes and reviews from Jamshedpur, Jharkhand, India. Her latest (third) collection of poems is Inhabiting.