A poem in solidarity with women like Rana Ayyub, Safoora Zargar, Agrima Joshua, Rhea Chakraborty and Deepika Padukone, who have recently been the targets of the vilest forms of harassment, media trials and witch hunts.
A cauldron of comments comes to boil
Threads of trending tweets are grilled.
We devour the barbecue of barbarity brazenly
Prepared for us wayward witches.
Vicious video streams we churn
In a drumful of our monthly red wine.
Thrash out our way through the thoroughfare
Thirsty for us wayward witches.
We tear out titular headlines of news-
papers to roll and trip on trolls –
We write pagan poetry for a porno population
High on us wayward witches.
Butchers feed caricatures of our character
To cattle which chew our chats to cud.
Rising over a cacophony of croaking
Cronies, a crescendo of our moans
And ululation for a ‘Live’ sacrifice –
We slaughter a calf for our Medea
Guffawing with us wayward witches.
Devanshi Srivastava is an ever fading, ever emerging, ever expanding, ever receding, continually constituting, sea like ‘is-ness’.
Featured image credit: Pariplab Chakraborty