Maya
Rani Khosla
Recall: every volume of air taken in,
is
the sum of green leaves, mint, algae, fern, lichen,
red
leaves, maple, thistle, sweetbrush, sage and Cedar
|
Wintertime Delhi
The three-wheeler sings like a high-pitched bee
Going uphill, quietens downhill, an open air blast
Smells of a thick-smoked fire, a small gathering
On the streetside, palms facing downward over the flames
Warm smell on an otherwise cold street
I have a scarf over my face, small breath-warmed airspace
With each breath, the ridge road cold with
Fingers of fog inside acacia forest remnants,
Behind a cow eating paper from a scattering of garbage
This is what reuse means here, it's two horns
Painted blue, the same dusty indigo blue
of a shirt I picked out the other day,
the whole pile smelling faintly of sweet incense,
the taste of south Indian coffee we drank
Still strong in my mouth.
Space between women is different here,
It is OK for an older woman to brush right by you,
Jump the small line to the try-out room,
I can't speak hindi fast enough, my words like the rock dove
Trapped inside the glass bathroom,
Bright grey wings washing the mirror
With its strokes.
Let Me Tell You a Story
Read at a "Healing Pole (carved wood) ceremony" and published in Terrrain
Magazine.
Let me tell you a story:
Remember [the dead] pray their
living force into the open earth that we are their continued flesh, their
ongoing breath
- Michelle Clinton (The Names of
Black Flowers)
As I lean against this yellow-skinned wood
I am bequeathing Chipko's women warriors
with the flowers of my memory, growing arms
like petals around bark
As I lean against these thousand years
eagles throw their sharp arrows of hunger
into the heart of a timeless listening
Leaning against this solid testimony of song over sounds
of destruction, slash and build,
I can still hear the sky darken and crack sharp
while the leaves of these Cedars stoke thunderous fire:
drops big as fists drumming loud over the skin and bone
of forests now gone, I can hear
hearts of blue moss feeding on raw drops coming down
I can hear my mother's bare feet, dancing in first rain,
the Bengali songs I was taught before electricity, before
faucet water,
before shipyard wood.
As I lean into the dappled sunlight of these wood carvings
green mists unfurl like flags singing their anthems:
of tannins, swordferns, birds flitting through
root-framed kingdoms, like sparks rising from coals that
once burned, that
still burn, that infuse the darkness of extinction with
their light
recalled into being
Any candle I hold has its flames conceived in the memory
of this wood,
from light turned into leaf, and leaf into soil, to waxes
and oils
Recall this, in the raw winds, alone now among steep
slopes,
that wash soil by the ton into rivers every year,
Remember to endow the chopped white bark, the crash,
the loose, open soil, with your own story of recollection-
Keep in mind, it is only memory that can feed the eagle
its spindrift power, its spiralling call
Always, endow these long-journeyed poles with the chorus
of your spiralling memory
Keep in mind, the way the crook of these curled green
arms
held salmon, mid-breath, mid-flight, to rest,
Recall this, in the tiny tufts of grass you walk in the
bowlfuls of sky
emptying out their fogs to caress what once was,
Recall: every volume of air taken in,
is the sum of green leaves, mint, algae, fern, lichen,
red leaves, maple, thistle, sweetbrush, sage and Cedar
Keep in mind, if we are to breathe at all,
it is these thousand years we will breathe
they are the incense, they are the oxygen.
As I rest upon this tree, I am bequeathing the Chipko's
women warriors with the flowers of memory
recalling silent battles fought to keep these empires
in memory always, recall birds tiny, bursting forth in
a shimmer of wings
faster than the hearts of shooting stars
Recall, do not forget, their darting into the thick
weave of minutes
may be all you have left
Recall spring leaves that glowed with the fire of their
first breath
brighter than the old year's leaves,
keep in mind, how giant roots speadeagled their way
framing river bank, holding the mud from slopping in.
Recall flocks of birds in vast sheets of water
reflected as they rose, seeking shelter in the depths
of thick forests
Remember the huge green caves of light
fused an air no words could reach or measure
Remember, for this is the strongest testimony of song. |
