A Poem a Day (617): Woman paraded naked

 
Woman paraded naked
 
Stark headlines tilt sideways, rip ragged,
papers strewn waste in the sharpening rain.
Letters slide, seek a silenced escape,
a way out, an alternative way of being.
 
Dragged out, stripped, paraded naked,
tied to a telegraph pole and beaten to a bruise.
A mother. Red and blue. Red and blue. Red and blue.
Tears awash in our rain. We hurtle through.
 
The rescue party, we arrive too late by hours,
stand agape. A simmer of men eye the spectacle,
the debacle, the sex that causes such offence.
We are the few who disagree.
 
Her only son eloped before his wedding night,
so someone had to pay. Someone female. The mother.
She is the visible invisible, now safe, blanketed,
but trauma digs at the contours of her face.
.
It’s 4am. Someone blew the whistle.
A police officer who watched is suspended.
In the hospital, all is quiet. The walls bristle,
heavy with the weight of history. Female souls.
 
It permeates the corrugated roof. We watch it sag.
The rain sketches ever-increasing circles of light years.
The mother stares at the wall, seeks understanding,
but it stares back blankly. No words can explain.
 
All this water will never wash this foul shame away.
Her husband insisted they had not known,
their son had kept this other love a secret, hidden.
His lover flew her own gilded cage by night.
 
Outside, the men still loiter in the soiled street,
their uncorked outrage clouding the void.
The crowd will have scattered by mid-morning,
but history has already chalked them in.
 
This was an ‘inhuman act’, the authorities said,
gave the mother land, part of this country owned by man.
But this land had turned on her in her hour of need.
It had not forgiven her for being a woman.

Copyright Vickie Johnstone, December 27, 2023

 
 
I read about this incident on the BBC News today. Here, I have pasted part of the article:
 
“Cases involving assault of women are always under-reported because of shame. Families don’t come forward because it’s a matter of honour and the system does not support the survivors or give them a safe space to report these crimes,” says lawyer and rights activist Sukriti Chauhan.
 
In the National Crime Records Bureau database, disrobing is recorded under a broad description called “assault with intent to outrage [a woman’s] modesty”, which clubs the crime with cases of street harassment, sexual gestures, voyeurism and stalking. Last year, 83,344 such cases were recorded, with 85,300 affected women.
 
Link to story: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-67769453