Three Poems for the Girls Who Were Told to Stay Quiet

These poems are for every girl who was handed silence like an inheritance and is quietly setting it down.

I. The Loud Girl

They said a good girl folds herself
small as a packed trunk,
keeps her opinions like dowry,
spends nothing, shows nothing.
But I have heard the pressure cooker.
I know what held-in things do.
I would rather be the whistle
than the lid that learns to lie.

II. Permission

For years I waited at a door
for a key that was never coming.
Then a woman with dust on her sari
said, child, the door was painted on.
Walk through.
I have been walking ever since,
and the wall keeps turning out to be weather,
and the weather keeps turning out to be passable.

III. What Udaan Means

My grandmother never flew.
She rose at four, she ground the wheat,
she folded her wants into rotis
and fed them to everyone but herself.
When they ask me why I study,
I do not give them reasons.
I give them her hands,
and the height she was never allowed,
and the single word she would have understood
without anyone translating it:
flight.

Write your own. The first poem you do not let anyone correct is the first room in the house that is yours.

If these lines found something in you, that something was always there. The poem only knocked.