Dopdi's Lament (For Mahasweta Devi) Poem by Uma nair

When urban walls

Echoed prisoned prisms

When urban folk

Seemed pretentious

When the fields

Of tribal truths

Beckoned to create

An oasis of insight


Our bronze bodies

Caged a hundred haunts

Stories told and untold

No blue skinned fallacies

No honey eyed princesses

But bold beings of

Valour living beyond

Draupadi's disrobing


You wove Dalit

Dreams into plaits

Of sickening disdain

When chiefs and chieftains

Destroyed testimonies

Descended on my

Bronze breasts and

Tore apart my vulnerable vulva


My breast stories became

Your field of ferment

Caged men prowled

Like rats in search of vermin

Their ugly hands

Clawing corpse like marks

On my tight flesh

Seething with savage hunger


Born of the fields of fame

Burning with desire

Their belts and uniforms

Dripping with semen

Each one dug

Into my walls

Fragmenting and fracturing

My bloodied bastion


My Dalit tongue

Dripped with flames

Of filth from their

Satin smooth saliva

Dulna my lover lies

Stiff and stoic

Stone eyes watching

As rippled rapes resonate

Across blurred boundaries


Uma Nair

29 July 2016