Poet : Shweta Ganesh Kumar
Nestled within a tightly wound fist
Pushing hard on the curled up finger walls
Throwing her might against it.
This space is suffocating.
This space is not enough.
She sits back down, despairing.
Tries to fill her lungs with air
It is putrid.
She closes her eyes
And imagines the vastness of the sky
Airy, blue, splashes of white.
Nothing like the inside of her eyes,
Red, angry orange, yellow.
She presses her fingers to them.
Pitch black.
But not like the midnight sky
There are no glimmers of light here.
A hot tear wells up
And rolls down her cheek,
Salty, charting a lone path across her dusty face.
Not a river gushing through a forest,
Not an ocean with furiously crashing waves.
Even her tears are shackled.
She shakes her hair,
Some tendrils escape
From the braid decreed by others.
The strands whisper into her ears
Like stormy gusts that
Could bring a hoary tree down.
She liberates her hair,
Now a mane around her face.
It’s within you, they say.
Remember who you are, they urge her.
Her eyes snap open.
Twin flames dance in them.
Veins of lava bubble through her.
An ancient soul stretches up and onwards.
Unbound, unshackled.
You are not meant to be in a cage
Not meant to be bounded in,
By the thicket fences of can and cannot.
You are the primordial dance of creation.
The moment life breaks through.
Awake.
She rises up and roars.
A sliver of light cracks through.
She throws herself at it.
Her hands are claws widening it.
Abundance waits on the other side.
She groans and grunts
Her breath is a mighty storm
Her body, a gushing river
Her being, boundless.
The walls fall and the chains shatter.
The limitations melt away.
She is free
To dance, to roar, to create.
Shweta Ganesh Kumar is an award-winning blogger and writer who has written fiction books for adults and children. She was awarded the prestigious UNFPA-Laadli Media Award for Gender Sensitivity in the Blog–Web Category for 2017 for her article, “Why The Phrase “Boys Will Be Boys” Is Damaging Our Sons”, published in Women’s Web.
New York Public Library’s World Literature Festival and the Children’s Museum of Manhattan’s India Week have featured her children’s books, which celebrate the diversity of the Indian subcontinent. Her latest and fifth children’s book, Leela’s Special Day (Katha India), explores catastrophic flooding in the coastal Indian state of Kerala through the eyes of a child.
Shweta is the author of ‘Coming Up On The Show… The Travails of a News Trainee’ (Srishti Publishers, India) ‘Between The Headlines’ (Good Times Books) and ‘A Newlywed’s Adventures in Married Land’ (Indirom) are commercial fiction novels that received rave reviews from readers, book bloggers and critics.
Her short fiction and poetry have been published in Indian Voices- an anthology, Shades of Love (An Anthology of Short Stories), Winds of Change (An Anthology), Australian Women Online, Single Solitary Thought, Pothiz, Damazine, the Asia Writes Project, Bricolage Magazine, Synaesthesia Magazine, Writers Asylum and other literary magazines across the world. Shweta currently hosts a podcast called Storytelling with Shweta on Spotify where she retells Indian myths for modern audiences. Her current writing project focuses on the intertwining of the personal and the political seen through the lens of family histories set in Kerala.
Shweta lives in New York City with her husband, two children and dog.
The Stillness Project 