Word Impact Challenge July Entries

Word Impact Challenge July Entries

Word: “Justice”

Winning Entry by Ratna Prabha

The Blindfolded Lady

A blindfolded lady was walking down a dark alleyway, 

On her way to meet someone important.

Suddenly, the agonized screams reached her sharp ears. 

“Help! Help!”

The lady turned her head towards the sound.

She heard the incessant bark of a dog in the same direction.

“Aah! The poor woman bitten by a dog, it seems!”

She’ll manage! I need to be elsewhere!”

If only she had removed the blindfold!

She would’ve seen the dog trying to ward off, 

Four ravaging men working silently and viciously, 

On the now almost-dead woman. 

Entry by Rianka Bose Saha

Utopia

Through the broken doors

of hope

Sails forth quest for justice

Elusive and hidden

Under layers of upturned earth

The quiet and stillborn child 

Of fate sometimes 

Sometimes its delayed 

and denied

What’s justice?

Utopia of a ravaged mind 

Black, brown, grey

Justice mingles with colours

As voices are hushed

And batons are raised

Justice whimpers and dies, choked

Look at the sea now, the tides, they rise

The good fight will win, 

No more tears or cries

Entry by Vasudha

Dining tables of the rich,

Overloaded with food,

Poor children starving to death,

Workers walking without food,

Where is justice?

Innocent men beaten up,

Killed by the police,

Rapists supported,

The corrupt prospering,

Where is Justice?

The downtrodden harassed,

Good people lynched by mobs,

Honest activists put into prison,

Farmers committing suicide,

Where is Justice?

Rich men absconding

With common people’s money,

Banks collapsing,

But those who commit crimes are free,

Where is Justice?

Everywhere there is injustice,

Everywhere inequality,

Everywhere poverty and suffering,

Everywhere a decline of morals,

Where is Justice?

Entry by Anwee Mazumdar

A Tough Road to Justice

“Sarpach ji, I have repaid every penny. Let me keep my harvest. Else, we will starve to death,” Lakshman pleaded.

“Bloody cretins! Send Lali, your eldest daughter to me tonight, and I may think about it,” scoffed the Sarpach.

Lali, a headstrong adolescent, accepted surprising her family. That night, when the Sarpanch advanced on her, she took out a knife hidden beneath her clothes and pierced through his heart.

“Please leave my daughter. This is injustice,” Lali’s mother begged the police.

“The village lives in exchange for my life. A bit of injustice to serve a great justice,” Lali mumbled.

Entry by Santosh Bakaya

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”, MLK Jr. had  eloquently penned in Letter from Birmingham Jail; my eloquence is reduced to a stuttering incoherence when I see life’s blisteringly cruel see-saw antics- the bruised but brave rag-picker, the shoeshine boy  giving  a shine to bedraggled shoes, but not to his own impoverished existence, the millionaires in their twenty-seven floor house, crinkling their noses at the squalid slums down below, ignorant of the invisible  labourer woman suckling her ill-clad toddler in a frayed crib.
Life continues humming and traipsing to an unjust tune, as we wring hands helplessly.

Entry by Sonia Dogra

Justice & Me: A Parley in Progress

Donned in her toga, blindfolded by decree, I find Lady Justice ironically guilty. ‘Forsaken, have you, the virtues of Themis!’  I lash out at her for lack of ethics. ‘Would you,’ I implore ‘be kind to those standing at your door?’

‘Hold your horses, will ye?’ she says finally. ‘In all fairness, I believe in objectivity. No place for wealth or pelf, I put my trust in facts and verities. Do not embellish your case with emotions or fear; dispassionate I am, not moved by tears. Blindfolded, YES, but not blind; I urge you to keep that always in mind!’

Entry by Zainab M. M.

All her life, at every step of the way, justice had been denied.

“You do not need to study, you’re a girl, ” she was unfairly told.

“You should speak slowly, girls don’t raise their voices,” her mother spoke while shouting at her brother.

“He’s a good match for you,” she had to endure, crushing the dreams of becoming a poet within her.

“Why do you need to work? I can provide everything you need,” her husband admonished, never once allowing her independence.

And when she had her firstborn daughter, she named her Justice, who would get everything that she didn’t.

Entry by Kanakagiri Shakuntala

Prudentia

The ‘mass’ of justice and the ‘weight’ of the crime are see-sawing on the beams of the scales. Tipping and tossing as truth and deceit keep vying with each other, playing fair and crying foul.

No wonder Lady Justitia is blindfolded, unable to see the innocent and ignorant at the receiving end.

Justice delayed is justice denied they say.

Sadly many hapless lives are in a state of suspended animation due to justice crawling and creeping at its own pace.

The virtuous and innocent are driven to the gallows

While the kingpins, mafia and maniacs call the shots