The Name as Resurrection

Throughout her poetry, Mirabai invokes Krishna by name repeatedly—not as magical incantation but as a practice of keeping the beloved present and alive in consciousness. In our age of rapid news cycles and collective amnesia, naming the dead becomes a radical act. To repeatedly speak the name of the public figure we have lost—to insist that they not be forgotten, not be subsumed into generic tragedy—is to practice resurrection. Each time we say their name, attach it to their specific work or legacy, tell stories of how they changed us, we pull them back from the void of forgetting. This is not morbid clinging but active love: we choose to hold them in our minds and hearts, to keep them in conversation with the living, to ensure their influence continues. Mirabai understood that naming is power—the power to make present what is absent, to keep alive what has died, to transform the past from something finished into something still vital.