I Will Not Bear You Sons

By Usha Akella

A poem can glisten like a fresh wound. Usha Akella pays tribute to her own life and to that of other women. Writing from her Niyogi Brahmin sensibility with which she grew up, her poems are the medium for the unsilenced voice both of her own story and those of women across various cultures. She calls for a united womanhood in her poems dedicated to women violated through rape, caste, FGM, foot binding, mysticism, politics, terrorism and other patriarchal abuses to the women who have triumphed against subjugation building new ways of being. Rage has not caste, needs no algorithm,light a pyre with itof chopped thumbs and scripted dreams

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Mar 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781925950298

Book preview

2021

I

Ka Ba Akh

I wanted lakes to drink from and they took the moisture from my body,

She breathes, they said, and prepared me for burial,

took my mind delicately through my nostrils,

I was light as a leaf I made no sound.

Leave the heart, he said, she must feel this pain,

And all around me joy and laughter in jars watching like falcons and jackals.

They took my eyes and gave me kohl,

took my hands I grew claws

they gave me wings coated with wax,

took my womb gave me myrrh,

and the linen they wound and wound,

and the days they wound and the hours of my life,

and my desires they wound and I lay there without a sound,

you need not be Egyptian they said woman is enough to be wound,

they carved out my vagina and stacked it as a pyramid pointing