Nepal Quartet

1. Exile
A brute gauntlet.  A widening
moat.  Twice-barren fields,
seeded with stone,
nourish those who’ll never leave
What distant castle commands these heights?
What thorny outposts
sentence men.  To shatter bridges. 
And legs.  Between home and land,
exile takes hold.
A terrain.  A birthright

2. Truce
Unfed… The rutted earth throbs
Stubborn fields yield thistles
and graves.  On a schoolhouse
slate, the numbers add up
Households minus sons and daughters
equals… Goat at the stake
Teacher/ Goat/ Teacher.  Each throat,
like the yielding earth, throbs
Then, doesn’t

3. Riverstrike
What are these rivers for?
Boulder broken
streams stammer to a halt
Mid-fall, cliff-battered
bodies tossed into a quarry
Secreted blades
squeezed into fists
Fists slammed into walls
Kukhri-wielding
Embedded.  Waiting
…for the cry ...the scream
…the downward
stampeding rivers’ cold
cold call

4. Malaise
A nation bereft of sense
to know its distant (distanced) pain,
like the Himal it hides beneath,
a source, a gathering force
that never closes in,
but leaves every citizen
less sure of what the heart can do
and people be

(a previous version of this poem appeared in The Nepali Times)