Vinita Agrawal, INDIA

Exclusive: Best of Women Poetry: Edited by Padmaja Iyengar-Paddy

Vinita Agrawal

GIRL TO WOMAN

The journey from girl to woman

is a hundred slivers of a whole.

The spot of red at thirteen,

iconic of a finished girlhood.

A strange silence sweeping the body.

Girl to woman,

a knock on the door of something.

Innocence dissipating

like life from a corpse.

Something harsh

listening to the tangle of her growing up.

A wolf listening for a rabbit.

But once she comes into her own,

she preserves the light of early morning in her hair.

Sets aside an infinity of space for lunar madness.

On those days she curls upon herself

and lies on dreams soft like grass beneath a body.

Her lips, a precipice,

her voice, a shape that fills heads.

She is

what she left behind in your eyes:

an unclouded face.

She won't trade touch for love.

but if love is what she feels

she might fill her womb with your life.

Vinita Agrawal, a Mumbai-based author of four books of poetry, was the editor of a women’s journal for three years. She is the recipient of the Gayatri GaMarsh Memorial Award for Literary Excellence-2015, USA, the second prize at the TallGrass Writers Guild Award-2017, Chicago, the third prize in the Hongkong Proverse Poetry Prize-2017, the All India Poetry Commendation Award-2014 and The Hour Of Writes Award.  Her work has been widely published and anthologised. She has curated literary events for Kala Ghoda Arts Festival 2020. She curates a literary event every month for PEN@Prithvi. She is on the advisory board of the Tagore Literary Prize.

---

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