This is a garden, these are my petals; this is my armoring plant

that harbours the first light. Birthing river, are you ready to give to the world?

Are you ready to dawn my beloved auroras? To break my darling things—

evil-eyed and crouched against the cold respite?

What can I say about being a woman? There is nothing much I can say.

In a cup pin-floats your passive nescience; my resistance,

ready to arm itself, coils against the ripples

of a mighty hot earth, pulped like barbed wire

that's easy to bloom, quick to swallow...difficult to crack.

Here in this deity-womb climbs shoddy water,

fighting dislocations of the body—this body that is a temple,

a malady, a ground of battling pilgrims.

This body is disarmed and gentler than all that has ever happened to it.

Lunar dust that's blocked against the light patter of the rain

bears this body that is fleshed into something human,

so that one day you might understand

what a mother's labour has prized, what her blood has given.

This body that has loved and forgiven, disfigured by a thousand

cruelties, asks to flower like a bare sea.

All it asks is to be left alone, to be freed

remorseless into a grave of everyone it had had to be.

What is there to say about being a woman? Now, there is that question.

Will you allow me a final hour to heap up

all the bodies, disclaimed and given up to cerebrate

on these trifling convictions hollowed to the bone?

Not much to say about being a woman,

but while the shell cracks open, would you peer inside:

in it, raw magnolias—dispetaling like Venus in a drought;

scraps crocheting into a blooming Moon-God.

Snata Basu is an aspiring poet from Dhaka, Bangladesh. Her work mostly centres on passionate, personal bindings. She is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature at North South University.