Sun-olive skin,

And bare footed too,

With jasmine in her hair,

Tracing simple paths,

Past sunset mangos,

Brass pots and pans,

Woven fresh yellows,

Silk indigos and blues,

Where cross-legged tailors,

Sow tomorrow's worn lives,

There, by the shoe-Walla’s

Heap of soles.

 

Monkey-eyed boys,

Dash in and out,

Where turbans

And white sails of cloth,

Dodge carefree bikes

Ringing wild bells,

While the white cow,

Moos at the moon.

 

On she moves, gentle,

Untouched, through rising

Delicate passwords, into

Silent moss green temples,

Higher than soaring vultures

Where crystal snows,

Fall unseen.

 

Always there in the blueness of

Flowing sacred streams,

Cutting parched earth,

Across plains down to

Sandalwood mists,

Where pyres burning bodies,

Smoulder acrid death.

 

And there too, watching with

Ashen faces the mystic eye,

Amidst the drunken mantras of

Mesmerised skeletal sadhus,

Naked to the sun's wrath.

 

But on she wanders,

Never far from the heart,

Heart of the world,

The Motherland, India.