Writing The Limits Poem by Perundevi Perundevi

In how many ways
can we understand
the female tongue?
Not, certainly, as beads of vivacity -
even their redness is not a pomegranate's.
Nor as a pet parakeet's song -
with its recurring refrain
it's the whirling signpost
at the crossroads of a storm.
Heedless of direction it's not
even the trace of a road map:
destination is never its aim.
Sometimes it tinkles like
an anklet of disappointments.
At other times it is the prayer
of yearnings never in surplus.
On yet other occasions it is
lightning that aspires to play
hide-and-seek with the trails,
a sliver of light
abrading the eye.
Not quick to yield meaning
or reminiscent of diamonds in its dazzle
or aligned with any moral,
that female word is
our concord with freedom as also
grief over our remoteness from it;
and in the card-pack of sentences
that befriend and betray
patriarchy, a joker-trump.

(a poem in Tamil, translated by N. Kalyan Raman)