You can turn and go

 Rupali Bansode

Some feminists celebrate sisterhood and I did the same

But soon I realised it was not between us,

We were not sisters, or were we?

When I went to bed,

I couldn’t sleep, instead,

I kept thinking over, again and again,

What was lacking between us?

What made us live in our separate worlds

And stay away from each other?

Was it your fault or mine

or the fault of the so-called divine?

Which never made us celebrate our sisterhood,

Neither in our commonalities nor in our differences.

Our worlds are different

Sometimes you are at the periphery and I am at centre

And sometimes it is the other way around

But we need to make a world where we unite,

I tried to join your world but was not able to do so,

Now either you can come to join hands with mine or

you can turn and go..

—

I am Rupali Bansode. Writing poems was not something I had considered but a phase came during my post-graduation days, when I felt that my feelings were not understood by people around me. At this point, I intensely felt the need to start writing poems. Sisterhood is given a lot of importance in feminism. The idea of Sisterhood really impressed me but soon I realized that I felt alienated in a class of just 13 women even as we were being taught to celebrate ‘sisterhood’, but at the same time I felt one with the girls from my own community. They too shared this isolation in the class and hence this poem.