From Dusk to Dawn

By Sushminder Jeet Kaur 10th May 2025

She stood,

Barefoot at the edge of her name—

Not Draupadi, not Shakuntala,

But someone who remembered Ahalya’s stillness turned to breath,

Heer’s voice burned beneath songs,

And Sita’s exile: a wilderness of stillness and pausing.

She had been written in the silence between verses,

Braided into stories without even being heard.

Her identity had become a cloak borrowed from myth,

Or a garment stitched by hand,

not her own.

 

No gods spoke.

Only the echoes of a girl

who had once swallowed the sun,

now cradling the ashes of light.

Like “Prometheus Unbound”,

She bore the fire in silence,

her will, chained to stone.

She was neither the reappearance nor the unfortunate icon.

But an echo, and unspoken suffering between stanzas of canon.

 

The world called her by titles adorned with reverence—

Patience, virtue, sacrifice—

But each word was a sacrament of erasure.

She remembered how Keats once sang of “negative capability”:

to remain in doubt and uncertainty---

But even that---she thought---was a privilege.

 

Her doubt was an inundation.

Where she sank into the knowing

that she herself had always been the spectator of her own life,

And never the soliloquy.

Her plunge was slow, not a Lear-like rage against the storm,

But the still crumbling of Cordelia’s silence—

A melting inward,

So complete that even her frame began to overlook

How to belong to her own self..

 

The rituals remained.

She lit lamps in hollow evenings,

Folded clothes like folded prayers,

And wore her bangles like manacles of inherited expectation.

And when she wept,

It was not for pain,

But for the memory of joy she had once been told to feel.

 

They mistook her decay for discipline.

But she knew—

The fire inside her was not devotion.

It was undoing.

It was Kali—not the goddess of rage,

But the goddess of necessary ends.

To become, she had to un-become.

 

Hence, she let herself dissolve.

Each cell---a note in a requiem she wrote without ink.

Each breath--- a farewell to the selves she had lived for others.

 

Her frame—

Not resurrected, but reclaimed.

Not Eve seeking forgiveness, but Lilith

Walking away from paradise and into the unknown.

 

She rose--not as myth--but as surface rediscovered.

She did not need

Gabriel’s trumpet or Tennyson’s tides.

Only her own hands, now steady, pressing soil into seed.

 

She began again.

And again, and again.

Each morning,

A stanza unfurling

From the torn manuscript of her past.

 

The woman she became

was not Aphrodite rising from the foam,

nor Cleopatra cloaked in seduction.

She was Draupadi, walking blood-stained

through a court of silence.

She was Durga,

Keeper of crossroads and quiet revolutions.

 

She no longer sought to be seen

But to see—

through mirrors,

through men,

through myths.

 

She fed on poetry,

Drinking the salt of Eliot’s Sea,

where “fear in a handful of dust” had once dried her mouth.

But now she tasted fire.

 

And when the world asked

How she emerged from such holy ruin,

She simply smiled, like a Sphinx who had rewritten the riddle.

No phoenix, no swan.

Just a woman—

Who melted down not to disappear

But to remember

That even ashes can whisper.