1.
She cries shrill
curses at the sun, our mother Kali:
it’s her doing,
the thunder that rips the valley,
the rain that
lashes these flounced silks,
the wind that
sours the seed and curdles the milk.
Her hex is cast,
forged from raw bronze
in the cauldron,
under the earth.
She undermines
all sense, all sensibility:
laughing at our
thrashing lunacy;
she would undo
every one of us.
The skin that
wraps the bone is merely skin
and eyes – so
stubbornly blind – but flesh;
and like a
butterfly’s wing to the cruel finger,
there can be no
resistance to her will,
for we are
nothing to the twisting of the blade
and out of
nothing we will be irrevocably unmade.
2.
Here, crushed in
the bone white fingers
of this rain
bleached hand,
a ruined rag,
bleeding a mottled rainbow;
and to whom was
it, the thunder spoke?
Safe, in the
tourist cafe, coffee froth warmth,
safe, in
numbers, in mind numbing chatter,
mountains are
reduced to objects for conquest,
mysteries to the
merely unexplained,
the vast
wilderness of this land is tamed
with a
derogatory tut-tut of a tongue
or flick of a
hand.
Curdled milk is
easily sweetened;
and in its
sweetness
it will stop the
mouth and fill the hole;
and amongst
these hard red rocks,
there is only
the echo of receding thunder,
where brackish
waters subside
into a fleeting
penumbra.
3.
With the sun’s
return, all is forgotten:
the buzz of
souvenir shopping obliterates
the last rumbles
of the storm.
It is unknown,
unheeded,
that the thunder
has laid its soiled seed
and entrails are
boiling
in the Sybil’s
sulphuric pyre.
Rocks have been
cracked in rat’s alley
and arcs of
amino chaos
have despoiled
this green and lovely valley.
From these holes
brown rivers flow,
raging, in
dysentery’s flash flood tide:
blood will sour
like vinegar milk
and bodies will
be as torn silk,
leached of love
and bleached out
in the monsoon
rain.
In our beginning
is our end;
and in the end,
there is only
pain.
Beware, when the
thunder speaks
and the world
remains asleep
in its
passionless passion play,
for all will rue
the day
when in the
crematorial ash
of
Pashupathinath,
the golden
bollocked bull
will ride the
waking corpse
of the mother
goddess Kali.
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