Cerebration

Without Love We Are Hollow Skeletons: Moumita Alam

Moumita Alam is a poet from West Bengal. Her poetry collection, The Musings of the Dark was published in 2020. The book has about a hundred poems written in protest against the humanitarian crisis from the abrogation of article 370, the Delhi riots, and the Shaheen Bagh movement to the unbearable sufferings of the migrant labourers due to the unplanned COVID-induced lockdown. Her second poetry collection, Poems At Daybreak has been published by Red River Publications. The Telugu translations of her poems have been published in a collection titled, Poems That Should Not Be Written. In this poem, Alam has experimented with the form. The first line of every stanza forms a long sentence.

They say

love is a binary

And she and she together -

It's a Sin

to sleep with a woman if you are a woman

by sleeping they always mean reproduction

linearity of a language occupies them

they don't know how night

dances between two women's contours and erupts

as dawn

to Love You,

I never have to give effort

it's beautifully mundane and ordinarily beautiful

but they don't tell

how to live without you

they never know love

they mistake living under the same roof

as companionship

may the nights pardon them!

they never know

how can I survive

your dream and mine are

the sacred thread we wear at night and

without loving you,

i cease to exist and

without love

I curse the planet to be doomed,

And

without love:

we are hollow skeletons:

women in our houses are always this

the tongue is snapped off and

the bones are deadly exhausted.

They claim,

Women are destined to be skeletons but

Who makes this destiny?

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