Poem: Haunting Questions

Kolkata, August 9th. A resident doctor was raped and mutilated inside a hospital campus. What makes a rapist?

Poem: Haunting Questions

What makes a predator
Unequal physical strength
Amplified by
Insatiable hunger
The urge to be satisfied
Civility can go
A time and place —
Darkness and loneliness
The opportunity presents

It didn’t matter
What the prey was —
A human, a woman
Dreams in her heart
Years of sacrifice
Sleepless nights
To learn and serve
To save so many lives
To be the last hope
Of those suffering
Of bodies and minds
Sworn to the Hippocratic oath

It didn’t matter who she was
The predator saw only his prey
The perspective of a devolved mind
Years in the making
All he saw was her flesh
And his burning desire
A beast unleashed
What remained was
A crushed corpse
Life extinguished
Mutilated remains

What went wrong
We know very well
Lessons never learned
The incorrigible us
Questions asked
Answers evaporate
In short-term memories
Life goes on —
Till it happens again
The haunting questions remain.
~Ashok Subramanian © 2024

“Rape is one of the most terrible crimes on earth and it happens every few minutes. The problem with groups who deal with rape is that they try to educate women about how to defend themselves. What really needs to be done is teaching men not to rape. Go to the source and start there.”
― Kurt Cobain