whispered lineage

When you    come for me

pause at   the common threshold

but don’t wait

as I don’t. Give me

at least    that confidence

and watch me race far

ahead.

*

There will be others crying

in my place

your eyes will be dry

and in that desert

you will always drown.

*

I won’t    say goodbye.

I didn’t know you long.

It may be you weren’t

worth the acquaintance

or that    we each

came here     too soon

when the only thing

we cannot cheat

is time.

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Poem, written 2001 (Indian Himalaya), published in CHA: An Asian Literary Journal #27, April 11, 2015: http://www.asiancha.com/content/view/2015/489/)

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I pulled away. Adam
from his clay and there
in the earth a little piece
of afterbirth. Windy trees
flailed and no-one took the
measure of this seedy miracle.
Only a woman, from the fields,
who came running womb agape,
the bright air shuddering as she
tasted a little on her tongue. Fill
this up again, she said, and make a
spermy sea. Then, start swimming.

How could I fail her
and how could I begin.

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poem published in CORDITE Poetry Review 49.0: Obsolete, Feb. 1, 2015:

A World Order

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poem published in CORDITE Poetry Review 49.0: Obsolete, Feb 1, 2015:

En Passant

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There is in South India a little man
I once met for a half-hour, one hazy
afternoon, over a decade ago. He

writes friend, how are you? every New
Year, and many another unremarkable
day, and we are both being here. I’ve

never failed to reply.

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From Tibet to India they come
pilgrims of the plateau putting
knees, hips then chest to the dirt,
cupped palms raised overhead.
Then, up again: calloused
hands, mountains etched in the eye,
this fathom-length step all the way
to the divining-place.
Or a place of reckoning, a
wager become a truth. But what
happened there? Everything, and
—nothing, though that is not much
use to the Chinese truck-drivers
who leave them robed in dust.

Nightfall, and a happy ache of
bones and their tempered symmetry
in the raising and lowering of this
bivouac of faith. Behind them,
vertical fires marking the far
horizon
a hundred pyres of flesh
and bone, lighting their way.

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 (Between February 2009 and 2014 131 ethnic Tibetans have self-immolated in and outside Tibet in protest against Chinese persecution, many leaving statements of intent. In 2012 an English Tibetan Buddhist in a French monastery followed them; personally known to the poet, he left no written note.)

 

I

Easy to count the numbers, all the way past one hundred and thirty,

not so much the names, or faces,

gone in fire.

23 years, a herdswoman, with a six-year old son

Father, being a Tibetan is so difficult.

We have no freedom at all…

A herdsman called Rechok

never gone to school

I am willing to take up the pain and

sufferings of all living beings.

If I fall at the hand of the

Communist Party of China, please don’t resist.

Sobha Rinpoche, in Delhi, when Hu Jintao paid a visit

Without freedom, we become a

candle flame in the wind

Student, 19 years, in a market square

No one deserves to live like this

24-year old, glasses, intellectual, a young Che, or Nelson, or Mohandas, says

It is my wish that the sun of happiness

may shine on the land of Tibet

Rikyo, 33, a mother of three

do not indulge in slaughtering and trading

of animals, do not steal,

Speak Tibetan, do not fight,

Bearing all sufferings of the sentient beings on myself,

Do not resist by fighting if I get into Chinese hands alive

 

we’ll never hear any more

from any of them, or any

of all the others,

in Chinese hands alive

& unresistant        as we are.

 

 

II

 

Reams, now, have been written. Nothing

redressed. (Your shoes, I noticed first – ugly

fluoro runners taking up room on the dusty,

communal thresholds.) Couldn’t tolerate the

space of living you occupied, when to live

in that knowledge of the wound of others

was itself a worse one. Sole – soul – solar

Witness.

 

∞

 

The hi-fidelity silence that

follows, curves like space around a vacuum,

terrorises untruth, in the way a child’s

muteness returns the wager of worldly

adult pretence to its shoddy source. You

true naïf, to burn that world denial,

monstre sacré, to ash.

 

The last walk we took, to the village,

under a southern French sun, blood poppies

in full spate. La vieille sagesse in retirement,

tender with you, but gave me short shrift,

translating her savant archaisms into

plainer speech. As if she knew your

loyalty to fire already, could scent

singed skin and hair, the siren in the

distance. Neither of us spoke on the

return; kismet of some beckoning

in the road ahead.

They said you took a flag with you;

no-one told the journalists, the policiers

at the great doors, it was a Tibetan one.

Perhaps it had burnt with you, out of all

recognition. Only shroud-fragments left

for decipherment; no-one with the

faith for breaking that

genius code.

 

 

 

III

 

In Norway, and a Nobel Peace Prize awarded there

a quarter-century ago, turned away, now, from the corridors

of power, His Holiness the Dalai Lama says:

entirely depends on motivation. If such a drastic action

takes place with full anger, then negative.

But more compassionate, more calm mind,

then sometimes maybe less negative.

No-one questions the motivation of the

Chinese Communist Party, the Norwegian,

South African, Czech, Australian ministers and all

their soiled bedfellows who have shown him the door.

This the age of diplomacy whose furthest

refinement is to exchange sealed

prophylactics between heads-of-state

pretending protection from the mutual

infection that has already coupled

with tainted blood.

 

Easy to forget that

fire burns germs

kills off the worst

offenders.

You only have to be

tough enough

to eat its flames

without regret.

 

Entirely depends

on motivation.

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In Memoriam Hashem Shaabani
(Ahwazi Arab poet executed by the Iranian regime, January 27, 2014)

We searched you in the hollows
And we searched you in the fen
We took you down for mercy
And we took you down again

We heard you’d gone a-roaming
And taken up your pen
We heard you used the Holy Name
And took that Name in vain

We saw you in the papers
And we heard you in the den
We knew you’d gone a-roaming
By the treason of your pen

We thought we’d show you mercy
And let you live again
We thought we’d offer clemency
If you’d just put down the pen

You raised it high against us
Stabbed us dead and dead again
With your prophecies of freedom
That take the Holy Name in vain.

We searched you in the hollows
And we searched you in the fen
We took you down for mercy
And we took you down again

We found you in the hollows
And we found you in the fen
And we took you down for mercy
So you’ll never rise again.

 

(published in Overland Literary Journal #217, Summer 2014: https://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-217/poem-martin-kovan/)

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Poem written April 2011 in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Published online Dec. 9, 2013 in PERIL Magazine #17: Dualities: http://peril.com.au/current-edition/choeung-ek-killing-field/

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