The rivers, the mountains, the forests
Are to which we belong
We ever belonged
Until they came along
With high advanced machinery
Trucks laden with artillery
State sponsored police thievery
To lay claim
On all of this
Through breaking, distorting laws
And other tricks
Under the guise of ‘development’
That we are irreverent, so they say
Threatening us to go away
No way, we say
For we simply won’t walk away
Fight – We will
And continue to struggle
Our resistance will go on
Which they’d fail to muzzle
–They’d fail to muzzle.
Prerna Bakshi is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of Burnt Rotis, With Love, a debut full-length collection of poetry from Les Éditions du Zaporogue (Denmark), long-listed for the 2015 Erbacce-Press Poetry Award in the UK and cited as one of the ‘9 Poetry Collections That Will Change The Way You See The World’ by Bustle Magazine in the US. Her work has been published widely, most recently in The Ofi Press, Red Wedge Magazine, TRIVIA: Voices of Feminism and Prachya Review: Literature & Art Without Borders. This first appeared in Tuck Magazine.
Photo by Julien Laurent.
