A strange spirit sculpts the trees;
the strangeness plays in the breeze, an ancient voice,
                                                   is the world to the mind.
I close my eyes, feeling the million prayers
sitting on the villages across the land of my father;
a warm memory, a cry behind the deodars,
Years have broken time into small fragments of light and
     shadow;
elsewhere a hawk swoops to its deep experience of hope,
a large group of stony women in front of a shrine
silently sit out the whole day waiting to be cured,
of their own will, their supernatural eye,
                                                  to see the sad nature of themselves
return their stares of dry, drab weeds.
And in the trees a chatter of monkeys.
With what brief magic can a little life waken?
What is there in ceremony, in a ritual’s deeply hidden meaning?
The familiar words are rude like roots, and out of place,
hanging like history in which one’s sky stumbles.
In the world it is always I who come back
to myself, that far flower of thought;
the sacred cold books flash with star pyres.
                                                   And a small guilt veins
the leaves of my touch, fills my naked ears
like a spirit. Any cult here, triumphs for ever.
The indistinguishable bodies stretched on the dusty earth
hone the ceremony to a hard glow,
a spasm pulls me from the depths of sunken sleep,
across those empty cages of time which measure that road.