Varanasi, India (hers) |
by Carmen Firan |
|
Mixing up bodies and exchanging souls among them At daytime playing death with ironical patience At sunset to only start all over again The End in Varanasi * There are neither disappearances nor separations, Only meanderings of the mind. What remains after nothing remains Is the soul pulverized into air and walls, The unbeing just as illusory as the flesh. * Over there where the ones started will never be ended Where the sun rises from Ganges on a shield Where Earth rotates with nowhere to go Under the dried-up hump of the fiery cow Over there the idols rest serene on the sun They share eternity in small cups of saffron Mixing up bodies and exchanging souls among them At daytime playing death with ironical patience At sunset to only start all over again * The promise of death delayed Agonizing wrecks On the stairs to Heaven With its face of a famished saint The fire is smoldering on the pyre Lit up by ageless men The Destroyer blows the ashes of a girl On a bee wing From above only the smirk of ravens The illusion of the ultimate death * Fleshless bodies coming in and out of mother Ganges, The heaven and cleansing for the chosen, Laundry is beaten against rocks and laid in the sun On the oldest piece of earth Longed for and loathsome Leprous beggars good luck vendors,recluses (ascetics) with painted faces Cow manure dusty illusions abandoned sand castles Wrinkled monkeys hanging on ruins jump from nothing into nothing Bicycles rickshaws cloths shrouds mimicking already-cremated bodies Passing through the rusted machinegun resting below the only guardian At the door of the coveted city Bells, horns, Shiva’s roar fed From sunrise to sunset with oils and carnal petals Shoe shiners of worn out soles, famished dogs Men pissing for thousand of years on the side of the same road Stuffed with countless lives reincarnated Only the conquerors defeated There is no bigger humiliation than the happiness of the condemned Silently placing in line their suffering Awaiting the fire to only start from the beginning The putrefaction of purity and the purity of putrefaction Over Himalaya snow is howling with hands put together * How much of us is by mere chance And how much by aimed errors Which breath can choose its body When all one can see through a hole in the sky Are white and steady stairs The ribs of god hauling its resignation through the desert Pilgrims sipping from the sacred hoof The water of a foreign empire * We will return over here unseen On the wing of an insect Or in the skin of a snake We will quietly unfold our sheets And lotus will spring from our joints With delicate neck Moving our world from above So we can reach with our soles the sunset Neither sky nor earth Neither human nor bird Only life chopped-up on a tray From which cynical gods Taste and spit in turn. * I no longer know what shame is Nor the humility of having not just thoughts But this body too towards which God’s finger Professionally points out my vulnerable spots Who could tell that poems are written with the same hand That rummages on the funeral sheet yellow flowers rice Some pieces of words left unlived The Destroyer is a riot of colours and dye He sits his legs crossed and plays with a bone baton Over the bent heads He captures the flying soul of the dead Sucks out his molecules and blows them into our joints Like spherical forms of fog in search of vehicles To carry eternally their transparency. * Our passage through here Is no more than a rehearsal For that Great Journey Where the two of us will fly on our backs With eyes grown wider By what we had to learn too late And fingers locked together As if we lived our lives Elsewhere And came here Only to scatter the ashes. |
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