IN FIVE STEPS: THE ROUTE TO ESCAPE MARTYRDOM

by A. C.

1.     Do Not Mourn. Especially faces who have long endured

old style glass frames in spectacles. Glasses foraying into

the future, your uv tinted ones can never hope to testify

about. Vision for the sake of the land forsaken kind.

‘Deprived of rights over natural resources’ kind.

 

2.     Do Not Hope. For the Mahars (you are allowed to read

the fine print spelled D-A-L-I-T) to be commemorated

in reverence of plaques. For the girl whose soul may still

hope to rise from the well to testify in court. For people

giving their lives to see they live or die a notch better.

For the law to be your friend. Or for anything that may

well feed your spine. With the contraband fruit of justice.

3.     Do Not Plead Not Guilty. You are, for the matter. Guilty

of unlawful actions unheard and unseen of. Till one evening

men and women in uniform storm your doors, seizing you

by the collar. Or wait till you survive the guilt

once your child points at the face of an old grandfather

permeating all over the news.

Let them ask you then, “aren’t we taught to respect our

Elders”?

 

4.     Do Not Feel Shame. For watching over typed phrases, statements

and words supposed to inform you. Of an octogenarian’s contraction

of something the world understands as pandemic. But within custody

of course, disease runs trivial. What’s Parkinson's anyway?

Just another condition, neurodivergent, doesn’t kill eh!

So, up to you to believe or refuse if the octogenarian

had his share of sippers, straw, medicine and treatment

in custody! Lucky if you believe, sad if you do not!

 

5.     Do Not Think. Let your cognitive power focus upon

your yoga sessions, parallel world of a post pandemic vision.

Trips to catch up, the how to of a self-reliant nation. Who cares?

of UNDP rants on sustainable development, inclusivity of the

indigenous population? There are governments for that, honest

and fair. Meanwhile sleep peacefully, Human Rights often fear

the ivory towers.

Author's Note: Father Stanislaus Lourduswamy breathed his last in judicial/government custody after spending his entire life working for the uplifting of the Adivaasi community in India (especially in Jharkhand). He prepared a report titled ‘Deprived of Rights Over Natural Resources’ highlighting the plight of the Adivaasi landless population. He had been implicated in a case under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) still pending in court and kept in jail despite his age and other pre-existing health conditions. His death in custody speaks volume of the present situation of democratic dissent/treatment in the country.

A. C. writes from India. Her work has appeared in The Alipore Post, Life and Legends Journal, and elsewhere. She has been a contributor in an anthology titled Narratives On Women’s Issues In India: Vol 1 Domestic Violence published by the IHRAF, New York and a global feminist anthology, Looking Glass Anthology Vol. 2. 

DEMOCRACY AS AN ACT

by Mary O’Melveny

Ardeth Platte, Dominican Nun and Antinuclear Activist, Dies at 84. Sister Ardeth spent years behind bars for her beliefs and was the inspiration for a character on the Netflix hit Orange Is the New Black. Photo: Sister Ardeth, left, and hr friend Sister Carol at the White House in 2019 protesting plans for a military base in Okinawa, Japan. —The New York Times, October 8, 2020

Who can say what lines cannot

be crossed? What laws must be obeyed?

Most days, it feels as though we

are all complicit in our world’s great ills.

 

Who can say how we will react

when guilt cannot be assuaged

in ways that “they” deem polite?

Safety in numbers does not always save.

 

I have wielded bolt cutters

and climbed cyclone fences to search

for a more peaceful planet.

They had to wash my blood from missile silos.

 

I wore white until orange

was chosen for me by others

who mistook my acts for threats.

Humility can flourish in many colors.

 

Who can say what bravery is?

I was just afraid we would

all expire from carelessness,

that we would disappoint by despairing.

 

I always loved my life here,

even strip searched and shackled.

My convictions were the dues

I paid to earn my right to be a truthteller.

 

Who can say how we best serve

as stewards of our earthly time?

I never judged others’ paths

but I knew my own footsteps were not enough.

 

In the end, we are all fellow

travelers trying to bend

the moral arc toward justice.

Who can say for sure that we will not succeed? 

Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press. Mary’s poetry collection Merging Star Hypotheses was published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2020.

REVIVAL

by Spatika

People protest against the Citizenship Amendment Bill—which allows Hindus from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan to get citizenship and exclude Muslims from the same countries—in New Delhi on December 7, 2019. Javed Sultan/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images via Vox, December 16, 2019

Are America’s Blacks and India’s Muslims politically comparable? This question has acquired a new salience with the rise of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, underway for weeks in the US, covering several hundred cities. Comparisons have been drawn with the anti-CAA protests in India, lasting three months after mid-December, rebelling against the attempted demotion of India’s Muslims to secondary citizenship. The mainstream Black argument that Blacks have been treated as inferior Americans, with Whites as the putative owners of the nation, is not altogether distinct. —The Indian Express, July 6, 2020

After a gap of 5 months, anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protests were once again back on the streets of Dibrugarh with hundreds of activists of the All Assam Students’ Union (Aasu) taking out a motorcycle rally. —The Times of India, August 4, 2020

I have loved Julius Caesar in stories
from my English friends.
I have despised Julius Caesar in words,
striking upon ages.
I live today in burning home astray, my mother
carries small paper notes in tattered folded hands,
saree sifts light through, the only windows left.
the men in uniform are
almost here, asking for signed papers.
I have none. I wish
they did not have pilots fly overhead in our screams, I wish
the skies did not rain upon our chalk graffiti, because
paint was for rich. I wish
our written word wasn’t flung behind bars
nobody to see, I wish
this had never begun.
Caesar lived through citizen’s strangled breaths.
but today I can hear him say,

“My countrymen never cried,
  for my death. Pilgrims, ragged urchins,
  rum-cupped lips did not bawl from inns,
  ivory clad nobles’ eyelids batted away at dry air,
  but even in those sleeping beneath crumbling columns,
  clothes carried not a
  single tear. there was
  no force, no sheer strength of circus led gladiator,
  no power of cavalier battalion, that brought
  forth water of the bodies that my countrymen wore.
  until
  someone spoke
  Antony, my noble aide, Antony
  the moonlight to remember when my rays
  no longer served people their warmth
  Molten silver, seeping shades of wrong
  and glory mingled in lava beds,
  thorn showers, Antony’s words,
  bitter water came streaming forth,
  chiseled edges, Antony’s words,
  cracks to a country’s soft minds,
  breaking
  stealthily through brittle floodgate woes.”

And thousands of years later, come such
  a time of dark pits laden with the bodies of
            my robed brethren.
  a time of words printed in white against white pages
            the children born with sight never see.
  a time of petty gains made from my father’s caps
            pieces of marble tablet remain, which is mosque, which is tomb?
  a time when nobody can say.
today is here because yesterday was deaf to the pleas
of a thousand years.
are Antonys only built for dictators?
today is here, because the day I had a home, those on
the other side would walk confidently past it.
for when I still found chalk to write,
the only hands that rose was to cover people's eyes.
and now
masks are here to silence us.
a viral emergency is the cloak everyone wears around me,
I was born here and I am to leave,
can tears of rage be washed with bottles of hand sanitizer?
I didn’t need arms to fight,
I needed you, I needed her, I needed many.

Spatika is a fourth year student at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali, pursuing an Integrated Master's in biology. She is an INSPIRE Fellowship recipient, interested in neurobiology and writing. She is also a contributor at Feminism in India, and Delhi Poetry Slam, and a senior editor of her institute magazine.

POEM FOR THE POETS OF MYANMAR

by Jo-Ella Sarich

Myo Yan Naung Thein "spent six months in prison last year after posting a satirical poem to Facebook deemed insulting to the then president Thein Sein. Two of the lines read: 'I have a tattoo of the president’s face on my penis / My wife is disgusted.'" —“Free speech curtailed in Aung San Suu Ky’s Myanmar as prosecutions soar,” The Guardian, January 8, 2017

That time you
lay, wine-numbed, upon the bench
cling-wrapped like luncheon meat, and branded
yourself ‘Slut’ in another language
(accidentally, you didn’t discover until that
night out in Roppongi)

When you ran outside and cried
into the sun. And
That friend had
her twin’s names tattooed
on her wrist, and tattooed
Angel wings around
the name of the one
who first learned to Fly.

When That razor
was like a river in your hand
when you dug deep so they would see,
that being is just a hair’s breadth. When you carve
Freedom, and it’s just a word written in another language, just
thousands of tiny pin pricks that span the world. Like
light seen from space, if you see his back it’s
golden with his scars. I want to

Run

my fingers along them with the lightest touch,
connect them like humanitarian corridors. Because you can’t
lose those scars. But That leopard
could change its spots just by dreaming it can Fly, so

turn the page quietly, and I’ll write you a poem
in a place where no-one will ever read it.

Jo-Ella Sarich lives in Petone, New Zealand beside the beautiful Wellington harbour. She has worked as a lawyer for a number of years, and has a husband and two small girls. She has recently started writing again in her spare time. Her poetry has appeared in Tuck Magazine and The Galway Review, and will be appearing in the upcoming Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2017.

95 YEARS

by David Feela





Shadows of the first days lengthen
like steel bars across the floor.
Parallel lines take the mind

down its railroad track,
a freight train that won’t stop
for more than 10,000 days.

It doesn’t matter
if you stand or sit.
Life.  You stop counting.


David Feela writes a monthly column for The Four Corners Free Press and for The Durango Telegraph. A poetry chapbook, Thought Experiments, won the Southwest Poet Series. His first full length poetry book, The Home Atlas appeared in 2009. His new book of essays, How Delicate These Arches  , released through Raven's Eye Press, has been chosen as a finalist for the Colorado Book Award.