I have seen her draped in the magenta hues of her dupatta
Like a rose blooming amid a thorny bush.
I have seen her basking in the golden glow of the sunshine,
Like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon,
spreading her wings to fly.
And in her heart lies a sea of cyan dreams
Like a mermaid waiting to dive into the deep blue water.

Every woman's heart plays with the 'diyas' of Diwali,
Like a sky sparkling with lights and smoke, a joyful folly.
But in the end, her heart settles on those who can take her forest fires like a spring's garden,
Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, her flames were well-laden.

People judge her and compare her to lightning and goddesses.
But, they forget that if she is lightning,
they are the ground getting it in doses.
For she is like a granite of lively energy,
bursting with the taste of pride and fury.

And then, one day, I saw her mix all these colors with ease
Like an artist painting a new masterpiece,
Those colours blended into one, like the night sky's blackness,
masking the question, "Is her pain a secondhand book?"
An old withered copy with unfinished sentences,
the stale pages passed down generation after generation-
from the mother connecting its fetus
through the rusted umbilical cord,
because this generation sells secondhand grief
painting it with fakeness in the form of smiles.

That day the poem lost its rhyming,
incomplete as it stays forever in a dead poet's heart,

now this poem is a secondhand
as it went down
as a dowry in the hesternal lanes of patriarchy.

~Adrika