Golden Girls”
“Away with your youth” mama used to say;
She’d climb onto me, become me;
Slither under my untightened bow like hopes;
Snatching away the coins that my body yield.
At 15, a boy turns a man they say;
At birth, a girl a woman;
So she sits her wax body wide apart and becomes;
One of those, the golden girls.
The days are tight like those smaller bangles on a mature hand;
The men come and go, the women howl in rows;
“their wives must not let them leave”;
But from where are we to dye our breed?
The night becomes a mercy of the lords;
The singing man faints, the rising bird dies;
The woman becomes a soul from the body;
And there caressing her ghostly wedlock she lies.
Ashnita Saraswat