Special Edition: Sriparna Mitra

Sriparna Mitra

She was a scalpel in a world of corruption

 

Wearing her white coat like a second skin,

a village girl climbed her way up

through the whirlpool

of a crumbling system

to become a doctor.

 

She healed children with vaccines,

stitched up mothers

without fooling them

with anaesthesia.

 

One night, on her way back from the hospital,

a van stopped.

Giant men in black uniforms.

Some in khaki, some in suits,

got off -                                                          

some of them she already knew

who once called her “sister.”

 

They pierced her internal flesh,

stripped her womb with their salacious teeth,

as if erasing could dissipate

her thoughts into oblivion.

 

They thought she’d vanish

like other commodified women,

whose names history gulps

before the ink dries up.

 

But truth never lies

beneath balky bedsheets,

just because its body perishes.

 

Her image multiplies

like a virus

in the cells of every woman now.

 

Her flesh may be crippled,

but

her pen is still inking

on the fair pages

of medical recipes.

***

Bio: Sriparna Mitra is a poet from India with a Master’s in English Literature and Language and a B.Ed. She has cleared the NET JRF in English and finds inspiration in the subtleties of everyday emotion. Her poetry has been featured in Paradise on Earth: An International Anthology Volume II, Double Speak Online Literary Magazine, The Wise Owl Magazine and Piker Press Journal. Through lyrical expression, she seeks to capture the unsaid and the unseen in the human experience.

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Setu, June 2025