A red hibiscus

Flattened under your heel

Its velvety crimson stigma crushed

Its powdery yellow anthers smudged against the tarmac its slender style broken like a frail tendril.

Four petals bleed on the road

Until antiseptic sun rays deal with the damp patches. And there is nothing left, just a withered, shriveled, memory of a flower that once was.

No obituaries will be written for it,

Newspapers won’t report its loss.

The peduncle and receptacle will separate from the ovule, all parts float away from the whole.

Beauty will not be beauty,

Nor entity an entity

Something that once was will fall short of being, I will watch it die. I will cry.

Another girl child gone

A womb scraped bare of an angel’s soul.

God is God no more,

Man is not man.

I am a speck, a fleck, a crumb of a woman, when a female fetus is snatched away. My placenta shrivels with shame Wishes that it had the strength of my spine.

                                      ~ Vinita Agrawal

                                             Mumbai, India