Nine Nights

Woman, wear the sari —
let the cloth fall
the way a river
chooses its banks.
One glance at you
and a hundred hearts
forget how to beat quietly.

Do not drive to the park.
Do not wait at the river's steps
when the light thins.
In village, town, and market,
they are not looking at you —
they are looking through you,
and what they find there
they will call their hunger.

At dusk, do not write poems
to the sky.
Your soft sentences are seeds,
and somewhere a mind is soil
for a violence you never planted.

You were born a girl.
So walk the earth as if it were glass
and your body the only weight it must hold.

Woman, wear the sari.
Even when heat peels the cloth
from your chest, there is no mercy
in the sun, none in the street —
so pull it close and become
smaller than your own breath.

Dress a monkey and it will look beautiful —
they say it like a blessing.
But dress a woman
and a thousand demons
wake in the blood
and call themselves men.

Yet listen —

If the womb holds the making of the world,
then you are also the rain that cools it.
You are the fighter's fist,
the swift blade, the judge who will not bow,
the fire that governs.
Where injustice stands,
you are the name it fears.

One day the nine nights will come.
The long dark will end.
The sleeping will rise —
because the power of the goddess
was never in the sky.
It was always in you.

And Mahishasura —
every demon, every hand,
every law that called you small —
will fall to dust.
The gods themselves
will stand in line
to lay flowers at your feet.