Neelam Saxena
1.
An Ode to Ravana
O Ravana! I bow to you!
With your sword’s might
And your valour’s mysticism,
You could have forced Sita for anything,
And yet, to treat her with respect you opted,
Gave her a choice to decide
And venerated her “No”!
O Ravana! So different you were!
It’s just that the times were also atypical
And despite the innocence of Sita,
Chastised she was,
Even by her husband own,
And, to live a life in exile, forced-
People blamed you for her condition,
No one impugned Ram!
O Ravana! How happy I would be
To see you come back to earth now!
The land, in tatters lies,
And women are not respected anymore-
Her “No” is most often not treated as a “No”
And no one honours her now by asking
If she desires something!
2.
The Discrimination
It has not been easy to oil my curly hair year after year,
Bind them into plaits, put up a phony smile on my pink lips
And go to the morose school near my house
Where they don’t even teach, since my parents say,
That they can’t afford a good school for me!
While I juggle between cooking and books,
I see him go out to play hockey and it tears my heart apart.
It isn’t that I don’t love him, I adore him; wish him a roaring success,
Just that whenever he takes the name of his famous school,
My heart gets speared painfully, my emotions rage like a hungry tiger-
Yes, I too yearn achingly for a worthy education!
Read I have that a soul is a soul, be it a man or a woman,
The discrimination transforms me into a log of wood.
As I read the stories of famous self-made women-
Like Sita, who found her inner self in her life’s journey,
Or Draupadi who challenged the Kauravas,
Or Yashodhara who found the new definition of love,
I know that I too shall make it someday from nothing,
I shall rise like a prodigious phoenix!
Neelam Saxena has authored 5 novels, 1 novella and 8 short story collections, 32 poetry collections and 14 children’s books. She is a bilingual author, writing in English as well as Hindi. More than 1500 of her poems/stories have been published in various journals/anthologies/magazines. She holds a record with the Limca Book of Records, 2015 for being the Author having the highest number of publications in a year in English and Hindi. She has won several international and national awards. She was listed in Forbes as one of the most popular 78 authors in 2014.
Website: http://neelamsaxenachandra.com/
Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/NeelamSaxenaPoet/
