WHEN THE THUNDER SPOKE

1.

She cries shrill curses at the sun, our mother Kali:
It’s her doing, the thunder that rips the valley,
The rain that lashes these flounced silks,
The wind that sours the seed and curdles the milk.

Her hex is cast, forged from raw bronze
In the cauldron, under the earth.
She undermines all sense, all sensibility:
Laughing at our thrashing lunacy;
She would undo every one of us.

The skin that wraps the bone is merely skin
And eyes – so stubbornly blind – but flesh;
And like a butterfly’s wing to the cruel finger,
There can be no resistance to her will,
For we are nothing to the twisting of the blade
And out of nothing we will be irrevocably unmade.

2.

Here, crushed in the bone white fingers
Of this rain bleached hand,
A ruined rag, bleeding a mottled rainbow;
And to whom was it, the thunder spoke?

Safe, in the tourist cafe, coffee froth warmth,
Safe, in numbers, in mind numbing chatter,
Mountains are reduced to objects for conquest,
Mysteries to the merely unexplained,
The vast wilderness of this land is tamed
With a derogatory tut-tut of a tongue
Or flick of a hand.

Curdled milk is easily sweetened;
And in its sweetness
It will stop the mouth and fill the hole;
And amongst these hard red rocks,
There is only the echo of receding thunder,
Where brackish waters subside
Into a fleeting penumbra.

3.

With the sun’s return, all is forgotten:
The buzz of souvenir shopping obliterates
The last rumbles of the storm.
It is unknown, unheeded,
That the thunder has laid its soiled seed
And entrails are boiling
In the Sybil’s sulphuric pyre.

Rocks have been cracked in rat’s alley
And arcs of amino chaos
Have despoiled this green and lovely valley.

From these holes brown rivers flow,
Raging, in dysentery’s flash flood tide:
Blood will sour like vinegar milk
And bodies will be as torn silk,
Leached of love
And bleached out
In the monsoon rain.

In our beginning is our end;
And in the end,
There is only pain.

Beware, when the thunder speaks
And the world remains asleep
In its passionless passion play,
For all will rue the day
When in the crematorial ash
Of Pashupathinath,
The golden bollocked bull
Will ride the waking corpse
Of the mother goddess Kali.