O Medusa, Medusa.

Born mortal was your sin or the drunk beauty of your lips.

Was it your blossoming curves, the long tresses, or the roaming eye of Poseidon

What did you do to heave a head that was to be cut?

The fate of Medusa must have trembled knowing what was to come.

A beauteous maiden ravaged and plundered as a soul left in ruins.

Medusa wailed and screamed,

She bellowed in rage or implored for mercy?

Or did you accept your fate, and comply in defiance?

Athena, you were a woman—how could you diminish Medusa?

O Athena, how could you not grieve if not share her dolor

Serpents awakened to betoken poison.

She had to be killed when she was sleeping.

But Medusa was to transform in her becoming.

Even so, she lived on with her mighty head and glare of death.

Let it be a reminder to the perpetrators.

A Medusa is born each time there is a wrong

And, she lives on to evoke the conscious snake of a voracious force.

She will live on to falter the malevolent hands, to turn malicious into stone.

Priya Tandon