Preeta Chandran, INDIA

Exclusive: Best of Women Poetry: Edited by Padmaja Iyengar-Paddy
THE WOMAN AND HER PENCIL

Mother, thank you for the pencil.
The first one you ever placed into my tentative hands,
hands that gradually learned to wield it perfectly.
You know, mother, I wasn’t just filling notebooks
or writing exams.
I was writing my destiny too.
Why, I was writing history itself.
Mother, the pencil was a power you placed into my hands,
that helped me break not just some glass ceilings,
but way beyond, into the skies itself.
Women in space, am sure you’ve heard of them mother.
Liberty. Equality. Dignity.
Revolutions, led by millions of pencil-wielding daughters.
And so we pencil-wielding women will not talk to little girls
about the length of their hair or skirts or so-called feminine graces, thank you.
We will, rather, place pencils in their hands.
And let the world watch the pictures they draw, the stories they write, the magic they create.

Preeta Chandran is a writer and a poet, and the author of the books, ‘The Chemical Drones’, ‘The Painted Verse’ and ‘The Portrait of a Verse’. She is currently the CEO of a digital media firm eWandzDigital Services. Preeta’s poems have been featured in several reputed International and Indian anthologies.She is a recipient of  awards from popular literary journal Muse India and her haikus have won the Best Haiku Prize in The Hindustan Times Brunch Haiku contests. She spoke on the fusion of art and poetry at the Kolkata International Book Festival, which was featured on Indian Television, Doordarshan.

Best of Women Poetry -2020 :: Setu, March 2020

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