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Poem

Who calls you whore, o mother,
who spits upon you?
May be, a chaste woman like Sita
suckled you milk.
Though not chaste, you belong to the family
of our mothers and sisters;
Your sons are like us, they are our kinsmen;
Like us, they may earn, too, fame and honor;
Their devotion may make them reach
the gate of heaven.

The son of the heaven-whore Ghritachi
was the great warrior Drona.
Krishna-Daipayan respected world-wide
was the son of an unmarried girl.
Karna, the benevolent charioteer,
was born of a maiden.
Ganges expelled from heaven
got Shiva as her husband.
King Shantanu, too, begged love to her.
Their son was immortal Bhishma,
to whom Krishna paid homage.
Satya-kama became the sage
who was the illegitimate son of Jabala.
Jesus whose birth was a great mystery
became the great lover!

None is stained with sin here,
none an object of hatred;
Millions of holy lotus bloom here
in the lake of lust.
Listen to the words of the sage:
There lies no shame of the mankind
over their birth.
You have committed sin; That is why,
have you no right to return to virtue?
Gods have committed hundreds of sin;
still their divineness has not got lost.
If Ahalya got redemption
and Marry turned to be a goddess,
why wouldn’t you be worthy of worship
serving the truth?

Who the fanatic speak ill of your son
calling a bastard?
I ask them only these two questions:
I ask you, o god: One and a half crore children
are the inhabitants of earth;
How many parents of them desired their sons
and daughters getting free of lust?
How many are pure and chaste?
How many got obsessed in divine contemplation
to have children?
For whose sin, do millions of suckling die
in the cradle?

Purely from the carnal urge,
men and women copulate;
We are the children born of that lust;
still what a pride!
O the religious leaders, listen:
There lies no difference between the legitimate
and the illegitimate.
If the son of an unchaste mother is illegitimate,
so is the son of an unchaste father, no doubt!

[18.09.2018 Afternoon, Deptt. of English, Siarajganj]

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