'Someone else's song' by Kamala Das

I am a million, million peopleTalking all at once, with voicesRaised in clamour, like maidsAt village-wells.

I am a million, million deathsPox-clustered, each a drying seedSomeday to be shed, to grow forSomeone else, a memory.

I am a million, million birthsFlushed with triumphant blood, each a growingThing that thrusts its long-nailed handsTo scar the hollow air.

I am a million, million silencesStrung like crystal beadsOnto someone else’sSong.

In this poem, each incantatory stanza is introduced by the same assertion, “I am a million, million …” The sound is both melancholy and lulling, as if the “million, million”, with its childlike shorthand for vast indeterminate quantity, somehow numbed and erased the persona. (The comma suggests that the number has more to do with music than mathematics.) To be a million things is overwhelming, and Das is perhaps at her bravest in imagining such a universally multiplied and scattered identity.

The poem’s subtler device is a narrative one: the first stanza, essentially, is about voices, the second and third consider death and birth, and the fourth reverses the opening theme, voices, to silences.