Durga’s Homecoming

In the soft eye of prayers,

the oil lamps shine till dawn.

Goddess arrives this year too,

to the beat of drums and the ascend

of the conch shell. At the pandal,

half a dozen men

lift her off the truck

to the makeshift creaking platform.

‘Ho hum, ho hum,’ they heave,

and at times this ten-foot idol wavers

as though it would fall.

Draped in the finery

of red and gold, we loop around,

opening and closing like a flower.

Count grass and rice grains

in 108 numbers, as many names

of women gone missing

in our villages and cities.

At the cusp of Ashtami and Navami,

the Goddess slays the Asura. In the fields,

corpses of adolescent girls sway

under the branches of peepul,

as gently as the flowering grass.

---

Smitha Sehgal is a legal professional and a bilingual poet who writes in English and Malayalam. A Best of the Net nominee, her poems have been featured in contemporary literary publications such as Ink Sweat & Tears, Tokyo Poetry Journal, Osiris, Marrow Magazine, Acropolis Journal, Gone Lawn Journal, The Indianapolis Review, Almost Island, and elsewhere. She's the author of 'How Women Become Poems in Malabar' (Red River, 2023).