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Mules
by Yuyutsu R. D. Sharma
On the great Tibetan
salt route they meet me again
old forsaken friends ...
On their faces
fatigue of a drunken sleep
their lives worn out,
their legs twisted, shaking
from carrying
illustrious flags of bleeding ascents.
Age long bells clinging
to them like festering wounds
beating notes
of a slavery modernism brings:
cartons of Iceberg, mineral water bottles,
solar heaters, Chinese tiles, tin cans, carom boards
sacks of rice
and iodized salt from
the plains of Nepal Terai.
Butterflies of
the terraced fields know their names.
Singing brooks tempests
of their breathless climbs.
Traffic alert
and time-tested, they climb
carrying
dreams of posh peacocks
pamphlets
of a secret religious war
filth
of an ecologist's sterile semen
entire kitchen
for a cocktail party at the base camp
defunct development
agenda of guilty donors
the West's weird visions
lusting for an instant purge.
Stone steps
of the mountains embossed
on their drugged brains,
like lines of aborted love
scratched
on the historic rocks of waterspouts.
Starry skies
of the dozing valleys know
the ache
of their secret sweat.
Sunny days
along the crystal rivers
taste
of their bleeding eyes.
Greatest fiction
of the struggling lives lost,
like real mules
clattering their hooves on the flagstones,
in circling
the cruel grandeur
of blood thirsty
mule paths around the glacial of Annapurnas.
Temple, London
For Maggie Hindley
Wind howled
like the trumpet of a fierce Kali
rushed in through
the Temple Tube Station
to slap my face
to smother the flame
of my breath
and blind my vision
as I soared
floaing up the steely slope
of the ecsclators
in spirit of reaching
a hillside shrine
that our goddesses
always prefer to live on.
Once up
out of the Station
in the freezing cold
as I exerted to push
my overcoat up
my shaking frame
I saw her there
on the wet pavement
out alone in the open
with a swollen black eye
and an issue of TheBig Issue
held like a trophy,
a sacrificial rooster
against her sagging breast.