To
Muktinath
Yuyutsu
Sharma
On my way to Muktinath
I saw a
big rhesus monkey
lying
dead in grass,
like a
crumpled lump of domestic laundry
beside a
grey-haired grandma
pulling
ebullient strands
of
sunlight from
her
spinning wheel industriously…
A frozen
streak of lightning,
a crinkly
flower of divinity,
a flying
son of a virgin vermilion wind,
its
immobility shook me
with a
worrying loss and dread…
Dense
forest
lay ahead
and outside her hut
a newly
born baby
lay
snoring after an oily massage in sunlight.
What
would you do with it?
I wished
to ask
as I
hovered around the scene for a while.
Was it
killed in an accident?
Or is it
a forest menace?
A quiet
creek rustled by,
in its
glassy surface
the
frozen shadow
of a bare
branched winter tree
looking
like an injured frame
of an
untouchable
from the
village up above
or a
smudged skeleton
of a
shriveled, routed Yeti.
From Milarepa’s Bones, Helambu: 33 New Poems, Nirala,
2012
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