the widow stands trial
I’ll miss the attention,
that much is true.
the neighbours clutching
bags of flour at my door
as if all I could think to do
was eat. I appreciate the show
of sympathy, though of course
some hungers are larger
than that. winter bit like a dog
that year. I watched my breath
feathering the window
as our men prised
last life from the land, scouring
her cold cheeks for plunder.
funny: to them Mother Earth
is a harsh mistress
and not the first woman
we learned how to ruin.
but I digress — all this is just scenery
and you want to hear of the death.
see, severed from one husband
I wed Rumour in the night,
placed a band on my finger
and pledged to be his. now
my hand throbs pleasantly
as the villagers talk:
see how her face betrays
guilt not grief. she must have
done it. she must have
snapped.
much mythology there is
around the snap.
sometimes it happens
when you are slicing an apple
and a spider slinks out
from its bowels.
sometimes it happens
the third time he strikes you
(though rarely at moments
so climactic as that).
and sometimes it happens
alone in the fields,
hills pulled flush
against the gash of horizon
when something in you unlatches
and swings free like a gate
to some forbidden arch, some space
for the soul to surge through.
perhaps my story needs more
of a relatable flavour.
very well. to the judge
who asks how I plead,
I’ll say I’ve been pleading
all my life:
for some measure of grandness
to fill my wifely days,
some passion to slip through
the cracks of those hours
when I stood fishing ants
from the sugar.
a life for a life. his concluded
to make way for mine.
or so my accusers would say.
gentlemen of the jury, you must examine
my account; turn it round in the light
like some lovely old clock
whose hands you are not sure
you can trust.
there lies the question
you are asked to decide:
what unseemly things
have these hands seen?
let us put that to rest
as I did my good husband —
and while you deliberate
you may find me in the fields;
arms raised heavenward,
light catching my knife
like a smile.
Anuja Mitra
Anuja Mitra lives in Auckland. Her writing has appeared in Takahe, Mayhem, Cordite Poetry Review, Starling, Sweet Mammalian, Poetry Shelf and The Three Lamps, and will appear in the AUP anthology A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand. She has also written theatre and poetry reviews for Tearaway, Theatre Scenes, Minarets and the New Zealand Poetry Society. She is co-founder of the online arts magazine Oscen.
NZ Poetry Shelf 