Written By
Poet and Photographer J H Martin @ A Coat for a Monkey
ŚAKRA
This delving day
Of distracting thoughts
Brings no relief
From the fires of February
Only your
Slow moving brown waters
Washing over my Valium eyes
Sat near a poor family
I watch their two children
Collecting bottles from your muddy banks
As their mother –
Sitting on the sun-baked dock –
Sews and makes them blankets
Out of multi-coloured rags
While their father and her husband
Sleeps away the midday heat
Beneath the shade
Of their tarpaulin shelter
Śakra –
Where is your source?
And where is the release?
From the bamboo hut in the village
From the bamboo mat upon the wooden floor
From the new shirt and longyi laid out on it
From the donations and the daily rites
And from the echoes of that fish-shaped bell
Śakra – come on
I can’t see it any more
Not in that blue screen of blazing sky
Not in this mirage of sauna heat
And not in your cool but self polluted waters
Which can never pull down these walls of mind
Which January has helped my nerves to build
From the midnight howls of her anguish
From the violent slam of midnight doors
From the whispers of your cruel pretas
And from the loud and petrified cries
Of her young son
Who only begged and pleaded
For us to go home
To a home which is not his
To her home which is not theirs
To a home which not even you
Can ever choose to return to
No matter how boundless its ocean
Or how high its mountain
Around which you claim
Both the sun and moon turn eternally
Like the tankers
That dwarf the fishing boats
Like the stacks of containers
That obscure the golden pagoda
Like the sweat upon the workers backs
Carrying forty kilo bags to foreign ships
And like the dozens that crowd themselves
On to the overloaded hourly ferry
Nothing but forever changes
On your ever moving surface
No Śakra
Here – There is no source
No causal link
No escape and no release
Only a grieving sister
A son with no father
And these two children
Standing here – knee deep in your holy mud
Asking me
For a thousand Kyats
Image and text © J H Martin
J H’s Previous Contributions To Edge Of Humanity Magazine
