The needle is expertly
Jabbed into the vein;
The innermost stranger
Wakes up again.
My mask has fallen,
It grins at me:
I go out forever
On a faceless spree.
In a milder light
And a colder sun,
Absent-minded,
I reach for the gun.
A whole country
Is vanishing now;
What's left of love
Is my own forehead.
The skull's architecture
And the fading formation
Of reticular frescoes
I bequeath to you.
I bequeath to you
My fossil and my dossier.
And I join the saints'
Immortal choir.
Tukaram in heaven,
Chitre in hell,
Sing the same song
Centuries apart.
Their bone derives
From the same stone
That stands erect at Pandharpur
In the shape of a god
Both gentle and rude
And always
Unmoved. The river flows by
Like so many people,
While this stance
By itself is
A spire
And a steeple.
History is dust
In this kind of summer.
The heat is
The lasting truth.
Man spreads
His own rumour
In the form of God
To seize a creation
Not his own.
This kind of summer
Is the brain's
Own blaze.
It is Vitthala
who creates
Sun and rain:
Tukaram's joy
And Chitre's pain
Are two faces
Of the same coin.
Counterfeit and divine.
The sovereign currency
Of generations
Standing
In the same plain.
Let us speak of God
Since man cannot be spoken of:
Let us infer from the image in stone
The mind, the hand, the chisel, the stroke.
For the Lord is the infinite
Sleep from which we wake
And, in grinning granite,
We carve Him out of the night.
Into His muscles
We invest our souls;
For his heart is of stone,
His heartbeat our own.
Our voices are hoarse with God:
He is our scream, our cry, our moan,
Tukaram in heaven, Chitre in hell,
Tuned to the same truth, centuries apart.
They dance in the same place
And celebrate
Sameness
As the only art.
Our voice is a village
You have never visited,
Where God lives
In silent hunts.
You have not seen
His million faces;
For God resides
In uncivilized places.
He is the hunger,
And He is the food;
He is the grain,
The only good.
God is crushed,
God is ground,
So thoroughly milled
That He's never found.
He is all we have
From harvests to famines;
It is Him we praise,
And Him we curse.
He is our neighbour,
He is our enemy;
He is our ruler,
And He is our destiny.
He is our slave,
He is our landlord;
But for our sword
He'd hardly be brave.
God is our village--
Idiot and sage;
He is our convict
And our judge.
Him we worship,
Whom we whip;
On bent knees,
It's Him we beat.
He is our sinner,
He is our saint;
We begin in Him,
In Him we end.
Come pock-marked poets,
Join Tukaram and Chitre,
For the song of heaven
Is one helluva chant.
Ask, and you shall be refused;
But do not leave
Your voice unused.
It's all you've got.
Remember, our best
Poems were always
As bald as facts,
As bare as these hills.
Because our spirit
Has aspects of stone,
And because our stones
Are lasting mirrors.
