The survivors pretend to be sleeping.
Not all voices, the earth, 
the sentimental place they thought they’d left behind.
Carefully I cross
the palm-trunk bridge over the irrigation-canal,
and the grave-green waters flow on, limping.
Doesn’t its laziness deceive your eyes?
The peepul-tree-silence on the bleak burning ground?
Beside the low mud walls of a hut,
Radha, in the hurt-filled light
of an early November sunset,
in the sterile sameness
of the grass-lined call of the children.

There yet the mourning doves
fluttering out of the tall plumes of bamboo,
those first virtues
that make a country count,
while a freezing sense of inutility sits
on the dark brown throat of a woman
where the scarlet mark of the gods
had swept over through the years,
a suffering, subtle spirit.
Can the rows of lost souls out there in the trees
fill you?
And does one know too much of things of the world?

To the vermillion-smeared, whored stone
and bleary-eyed listless cattle of a slumbering land,
she shyly bows to a world of her own
(was everything past only a lie?)
the evening sun indifferently passing by,
leaving behind on her body
the awe of shadow,
before another shadow creeps upon her skin,
hesitant, intangible, real,
as over the stone,
as in a womb where love perhaps had never been.