Sharda Gupta Poet Free verse

The Silence of Men Is Not Innocence

In my house,
the women howled like dusk wolves.
But the men —
they sipped tea.
They stayed
quiet.

When my mother cried at midnight,
crushing her own bangles
with bare hands —
my father adjusted the volume
of the news channel.
He didn’t strike her.
He just… didn’t stop her from bleeding.

My brother knew.
He saw her trembling
when doors clicked shut.
But he tied his shoelaces
and went to cricket practice.
Because boys were taught
to win games,
not intervene in grief.

My grandfather,
a man of great wisdom,
wrote long letters on integrity.
But never once
asked his daughter-in-law
if she still had dreams
or just unpaid bills
and blue-black skin.

Even the priest
who blessed our home
saw her wounds
and called them “karma.”

The world loves
a quiet man
more than a screaming woman.

And so, the women burned
like incense —
silently, fragrantly,
forgiveness rising in smoke.

And the men?
They folded newspapers.
Wore clean shirts.
Voted for change.
And kept their names
polished.

No one remembers
the hands that did nothing.
No one accuses
the lips that stayed zipped.

But I remember.

I remember
every man
who stood at the scene
of a woman’s devastation
and blinked —
then looked away.

Because silence,
my darling,
is not innocence.
It is complicity.
It is cowardice
in a tailored suit.

It is the soft glove
over a sharp nail.

It wasn’t the slap
that broke her—
it was the eyes
that saw it,
and didn’t flinch.

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