Let me be free

Let me be free.
Let me be free 
to soar, to fly
to meet the sky 
on my own terms. 

Let me be free 
to write, to rewrite
History? No. That 
cannot be. How can 
the past be rewritten 
unless we travel back 
in time? To teleport 
backward or forward 
to the stars, we need 
science, laws, rules. 
Discipline. Then, can 
we be free to find the 
freedom we seek? 
All the same, I write… 

Let me be free. 
Let me be free 
to soar, to fly
to meet the sky 
on my own terms. 

I feel so happy—
euphoric they say.

Is it all a romance, 
this urge for freedom, 
this urge to fly, to soar? 
Is it all a myth? Or an 
ideal, an unattainable 
fantasy we create, we 
love, we adore? I dream, 
dream of utopia, of 
freedom and therefore, 
I write… 

Let me be free. 
Let me be free 
to soar, to fly
to meet the sky 
on my own terms. 

For this freedom, 
people war. They 
die. They construct
an ideal they consider 
right and then kill 
each other for what 
they call their birthright. 
And yet, they yearn, 
for this elusive, war-torn
idea that eludes as I 
write, tied to the rules
of a language and of 
words that guide me 
to think. If I were free
of these, could I
write or think or 
concretise my 
dreams… my 
ideals…

 
Let me be free. 
Let me be free 
to soar, to fly
to meet the sky 
on my own terms. 

Does Lucy* sing
of freedom while 
she roams among
stars? 

*Lucy: An ancestor to humans who lived 3.2 million years ago. 

Mitali Chakravarty has founded an online journal Borderless which has published its first hard copy anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles: An Anthology of Writings from across the World. She has recently brought out her first collection of poetry, Flight of the Angsana Oriole: Poems.