In memory of Smita Patil, Indian film actress, d. 1984

Slender wrist against forehead shielding dark eyes against shanty noon. Ten-wheelers roundabout raise a steady drizzle of waste. Lighten O lords her compromise. Nights inside the flap of cloth enhance her doubt that her children will live, that their father cares still they do. Blood bounds inside her veins to cast about that boat, endures foul floods. Where cleanliness has no dominion, it's pure work to gamble by paraffin light, cards frayed and gangster debts paid with cool submission. Misted skin of her face to the roof, eyes to cracks where electric city glow lights up smog. Her dream: a lamp passes over her head to toe bleaching her skin. There's a subtle graft one soul can practice on itself when bestowed with resentment, and she emerges from it beautiful. She reclines in dust, and it is awful of the world, this feminine stamp should be so low. The hand of one child on her hip in the night sustain her? Hours on a hand truck darken her grip in the prime of day. She passes twenty times an afternoon through a crumbling arch too ancient to be more than a landmark. Lingum carved in porous stone goad no romance out of visceral goals that fall behind her met with every plod. The fundamental unit of her time is the jiffy. One of her burdens has two legs and's old enough for the elevated crimes of the teenage male. Caught stealing a hen is entry into his estate proper. The low drone throughout the slum is the sutra of flogging. There is this volcano inverts in a dark mirror to suck a melting boy deep under the earth. The hostile event itself fledges him in ways that encroach on female dignity lifelong. Dust even in the provinces tastes of the city, and the pain there stinks male too. Let her wash her only outer raiment in gray water brought from an open pipe by the sewage ditch. Let every sort and kind be touched by her shadow. The plot is twisted around a war of abandonment. For a scant moment she squats in torrid shade, a translucent sky beams down on where she exists its useless nourishment.

© copyright 1996 John Godfrey