A Poem Dug Out

A diary is an interesting tool to rediscover your past. If you are lucky, you might even understand it a little better. Rummaging through my old diary, I came upon this poem I had written eight years back.

Holy and Grey Ganga

On the road, virgins and the rest look alike,
Sometimes the virgins weep and the others are smiling.
Sometimes the others clutch at their sad and used breasts,
And the virgins dream of riding galloping horses.
It is the strangeness of a magenta and black.

The orange of the horizon is the blood of the Aztecs,
The spires of the Kandariya Mahadev echo the cries of a tortured artisan,
And the inseparable story of joy and tragedy continues.

And in the frontier of light and darkness,
Where Gods and demons dance and caress each other,
Where the wrath of a Rama and the fury of a Ravana,
Coalesce into a tragic stab on my heart,
I look for the purple prose of your blood.

And in the forest of emotions of the earth,
In the holy and grey Ganga,
I look for my dream amid the corpses. (10th July 2001)