WOMEN OF THE LAND WHERE PAIN BLOOMS LIKE POPPY
Women, in war-torn lands, discover silent strength, rooting in darkness for new…
Read more →
From ULR
Issue 9 – Violence
WOMEN IN SHROUDS
Widows in a sacred town silently stitch shrouds, their shattered dreams consumed by societal decay
June 15, 2023
Dawn with its scarlet pride
Shimmers in the fierce water
of the sacred river
with all its glory and myth
Morning breeze unfolds itself
like an eternal mantra in the spirit of hour
and evokes its own divinity
over this pilgrimage town
You come here to find
the eternal love
of Krishna for Radha
And instead in the cobweb
of its obscure streets
you find them
stripped bare of flickering grace
of their distant adolescent dreams
Betrayed by the sacred fire
they never rise like a phoenix
but shatter like the shadow of the dead
They carry other‘s darkness
and succumb in silence to the sorrow
of their own missing lives
These women in shrouds
the widows in this pilgrimage town
roam through its streets
miles away from their imagined home
and gather tears
to stitch their own shrouds
A shroud
A symbol of an amaranthine grief
and that of a maggot-eaten society
A society without glory
that grows on women’s corpses
its root wraps around
their disfigured dead hearts
📖
PART OF A COLLECTIONWOMEN OF THE LAND WHERE PAIN BLOOMS LIKE POPPY and 1 other poem
View Full Collection →
Sarita Jenamani
Sarita Jenamani is an India-born Austria-based poet, essayist, literary translator, anthologist, editor of a bilingual magazine for migrant literature – Words & Worlds – a human rights activist, a feminist and general secretary of PEN International’s Austrian chapter. Her poetry that has so far been published in three collections. English is the chief medium of her creative process. The other two languages she writes in are; Odia, the state language of the place of her origin Odisha and German, the language of her country of residence, Austria. She employs these languages for the translation. Jenamani has translated Rilke, Rose Ausländer, both leading Austrian poets, from German in Odia and Hindi respectively. She has edited an anthology of contemporary Austrian poetry from German into Odia. She has received many literary fellowships in Germany and in Austria including those of the prestigious organisations of ‘Heinrich Boll Foundation and ‘Kunstlerdorf Schoppingen’.