This World is Full of Silences — Three Poems by Khushi Mohunta

A Language I Was Not Given

I was taught

to write in English.

To press words into form

like linen between palms,

crease-less.

Safe.

I was never taught

the language of ash,

the sound a name makes

as it disappears

from a register.

When a boy vanishes

on his walk to school,

how does his mother

say grief?

Is it in the same accent

with which I say grief

in workshop poems?

Or is it

another sound entirely —

one that doesn’t ask

to be understood?

There are alphabets

that burn in the throat.

I write in the one

that never does.

And this is how silence wins –

not with guns,

but with grammar.

To the Woman Who Lit No Candle

You didn’t gather

on the footpath with others.

You didn’t light a candle.

You didn’t hold up

a poster with the child’s name.

You kept your door shut.

Fed your son early.

Tucked him into silence.

You swept the corridor

twice that week.

You say:

The world doesn’t bend

for protest.

It snaps.

And I

believe you.

You have lived longer

than anyone with a placard.

But still —

I cannot

unsee

your eyes

the moment

the girl’s body

was found.

Not dry.

Not angry.

Just wide —

like a question

you never dared

to ask aloud.

Grief, I’m learning

is sometimes a locked room

with no windows —

just one woman

folding laundry

in the dark.

I Do Not Write to Save

This poem will not

ease the burden of the dead.

It will not prevent

a knock at midnight.

It cannot dissolve

tear gas, or policy.

It cannot make a mother

un-identify her son.

But it can say:

I saw what you tried

to cover.

It can name

what was unnamed.

It can bear witness

to the softness

that violence leaves behind —

a footprint in milk.

I do not write to save.

I write because silence

makes things worse.

Because someone must

record the unremarked.

Because if no one writes it,

they will say

it never happened.

And because poems

are not weapons –

but they are the maps

we leave behind

for when someone

wants to return

to the truth.

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About the Poet:

Khushi Mohunta is a final-year Master’s in English student at Shiv Nadar University, India. Based in Sirsa, Haryana, she is the author of ‘Waist Number 42,’ a young-adult fiction, and has been published in various lifestyle, wedding, and parenting magazines. Khushi firmly believes that stories have the power to transform, connect, and inspire people all over the world. She is not interested in the conventional notion of beauty; but intrigued by the stories smirked in scars, mistakes, and failures. These are stories with character, and the ones she wants to hear. Making these stories matter is what she tries to do every single day.