Here are two poems I wrote for the writers’ group. I promised I’d put them on my blog, so here they are.

Thie first one is in response to some discussion we had at a recent meeting about people using curses, so it’s about a curse. I heard one once. That was enough.

The second comes from my thinking about all the unknown, unnamed and forgotten soldiers who have died in countless wars, and for some reason I started to think about women who had died in needless circumstances and been forgotten. I then began to think about sati, or sutee, the historical and now banned Hindu practice where a widow immolates herself on her deceased husband’s funeral pyre. It was outlawed in India with the Sati (Prevention) Act of 1987. 

So, my two poems, below. Solitary Writers. October 2025.

Drabani

It was out before I knew it

From heart to mind to mouth in a moment

I had said it

And it was off, with broad wings

To find the one it was spat for

In honest hatred it was true in direction:

“May she get what she deserves, by my mother’s hands!”

Ah, I dare say she fingered the bow for me, the dead one

As the arrow took firm flight

And landed in the soft hart with the hard tongue

Time took rest

A curse gathers strength only in silence                                                                                             

Then I heard her man had taken ill

And was gone

Now she sits alone, shrunk and shrivelled

Without family or favour to curve her smile

It flung itself from my mouth before I thought it

And dwells festering in her empty dangling hand

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Unknown Wife. 1800.

Piled high, these stacked sticks make a stairway to stars.

Dawn rises and the pyre is a halo of thorns against the sun’s fire

Later, the flames will lick and lead her to the dead old man.

 Just twelve months before, her slight frame holding a tray of baked meats,

He saw the shift and lift of her sari

A memory swelled behind his plum filled eyes.

There was the whisper of a wedding.

Her father’s voice choked with pride,

her mother’s brow, webbed with wordless fears

The day was bubbling music, a palette of colour,

Her small painted hand shrivelling in his gnarled fist

That night in his chamber, on scarlet silks and the petal strewn bed

The heady scent thickened to nausea in her throat 

Head-bowed days followed her silently through echoing halls

Within a year,

his body stretched with sightless yellow eyes

Backs turned from her, she stood separate and alone

Now the morning fire is lit and she waits

Never mother, new martyr, fifteen, friendless,

A furtive curve in black

To make the final walk of duty,

That will snuff out her small spark for his pale flame

Remember, the skipping child whose hopes could soar to the sun

Now halted by the new burden of her insignificance