Dr. Padmashree R P Poet Free verse

Marginwake

A new notebook.
A red line
already there,
drawn before
the child's first word.
Who drew the line?

At the edge
sit the quiet ones:
the back bench, the bare feet,
the first to read in her house.
The margin is a thin strip of soil,
yet the truest seeds fall there:
the doubts, the honest sums.
Who drew the line, and with whose hand?

One day the page tears itself free.
It climbs a stick and becomes a flag.
Chalk learns to speak on walls.
Young voices spread like ink through blotting paper.
The chairs change. The ruled line stays.

Now the page is glass. It has no margin, only eyes.
The same hungers scroll past: bread, work, a fair chance.
The shout is a spark on a screen; the stick now hides inside a wire.
Still the edge fills with small, stubborn handwriting, like grass through stone.

Equality is not a chair pulled up at the centre for those kept at the edge.
It is many hands on one ruler, drawing the page again, or not at all.
Who draws the line now? Ask the child
who opens a notebook with no red in it
and begins anywhere.

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