Others' Song - 2
Which country's landscapes
gives shape and color to our traveler,
and his traveling dreams?
Does he wake like Tu Fu to watch frost, white on the ground, next to his bed, only to remember that
in the dream he was dreaming, the tree- lined road on which he was strolling or even the flowers on those trees
were from elsewhere? How does he discern these landscapes when they appear in his dreams? A backwards gaze
at a lit horizon receding from a speeding train window, with its spires of ruined temples, trussed bridges across a river
with a woman's name whom he might have once loved, sun-coaled shirtless peasants bent over yoked oxen,
tilling black clays like his grandfather, and grandfather's father, till a sudden proverb from one of his now unspoken languages
bursts like a tear or a bone from his skin: the washerman's dog belongs neither to the house nor to the ghat of the world?
My Poems
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