Poetry by Jayant Kashyap: The Absence of a Half

**due to special formatting for this poem, it can be only be viewed in its proper format on a desktop or laptop browser window.

The Absence of a Half

(after Mary Wollstonecraft)
It was one of those centuries not much for
women,
but who knew you’d be born
                          –the first of a new genus,
— in a family then moving into the
    wrong
hands //
     without those early reservations like your
four brothers —
you, lacking in education, but not knowledge //
                         not in a Germany of holy women,
but an England of poor sex / in a machined
London,
            what did those long hours of silence
            teach
you as a child? //
sometimes a comforter / a saviour,
                                          sitting at your mother’s
door from before it would be time for a violent
Papa to get back home, a bottle in his stomach /
or more;
at other times a woman that spoke (fearlessly
and ‘shamelessly’) and not for one but all,
                                                       freed from
an adorned prison //
                              what were you if not at least a
                               half
of what the world has always been? /
— Mary, and not Mark, in a time of great
change //
before everyone else, who was there if not you,
            and what were you not?