trowels and baskets
work on it daily, dreamy Nepali girls
tilt little pots of water on to cement –
but it’s gentle walking now. It leads ‘inside’.
The tall pine at the end – still notable
though it lost its lingam top for winter firewood –
begins the village: a couple of streets, a temple,
an open space with the pond and the peepul tree,
rows of brick houses, little businesses
proceeding under their doll’s-house-level beams;
rice being pounded, charcoal fires in pots,
rickshaws for people like me who don’t want them.
The children wave and call ‘Bye-bye! Paisa?’
holding out their perfect hands for my coins.
These houses may be eighteenth-century:
I covet their fretted lattice window-frames
and stare slightly too long into back rooms.
There are no screens at the carved windows, no filters
for the water they splash and drink at the common pump;
and no mosquitoes now, in the early spring.
But finally, stepping over the warm threshold
of the temple courtyard, I feel a tentative itch;
passing the scummy tank, a little sickness;
touching an infant’s head, a little pain.
Bodnath
I have made my pilgrimage a day early:
Ash Wednesday is tomorrow; this week is Losar.
Pacing clockwise around the chaitya
I twirl the prayerwheels, my foreign fingers
polishing their bronze by a fraction more.
The courtyard is crowded with Tibetans,
incredibly jewelled and furred and hatted –
colour-plates from the National Geographic.
The beggar-woman with her monstrous leg
and the snuffling children are genuine too.
I toss them paisa; then go to spend
thirty rupees on a turquoise-studded
silver spoon for the Watkins’ baby.
High on his whitewashed mound, Lord Buddha
overlooks the blossom of kite-tails
fluttering from his solid neck.
Om Mani Padme Hum.
His four painted square faces
turn twelve coloured eyes on the globe.
In the shrine below I see him again:
dim bronze, made of curves and surfaces,
shadowed, vulnerable, retiring.
Filmy scarves of white muslin
veil him; rice-grains lie at his feet;
in copper bowls arranged before him
smouldering incense crumbles to ash.
External Service
Already I know my way around the bazaar,
can use half a dozen words of basic Nepali,
and recognise several incarnations of Shiva.
If I stay here much longer I shall learn to identify
more trees besides those in our compound,
other birds than the rock-dove and the crow.
That plink-plink rhythm in the distance is a rice-mill.
The cannon is fired at noon, or to mark a death –
an echoing gesture. Now on the foreign news
I hear that the serious thunder-makers from Ireland
have crossed the channel. A pall of thick black smoke,
says the tidy English voice, hangs over London.
Here the sky is crystal. It is time to go.
Flying Back
They give us moistened BOAC towels
and I scrub my forehead. Red powder
for Holi: a trace of Delhi, an assault
met there in the wild streets this morning.
Without compunction I obliterate it –
India’s not my country, let it go.
But crumpling the vermilion-stained napkin
(I shan’t read it: some priest may do that)
I think of the stone foreheads in their hundreds:
Ganesh and Hanuman, who made me smile,
and Vishnu, and the four faces of Buddha,
reddened with genuine devotions;
and of the wooden cleft in a twisted tree
which I saw a beggar-woman sign scarlet
before she pressed her face down on to it;
and here’s Nepal again. Sacred places
don’t travel. The gods are stronger at home.
But if my tentative western brow may wear
this reluctant blush, these grains at the hair-roots,
I claim the right also to an image
as guardian; and choose winged Garuda.
His bland archaic countenance beams out
that serenity to which I journey.
Near Creeslough
I am in a foreign country.
There are heron and cormorant on the lake.
Young men in T-shirts against an Atlantic gale
are wheeling gravel, renewing the paths
in a stone shell chalked with their own
work on it daily, dreamy Nepali girls
tilt little pots of water on to cement –
but it’s gentle walking now. It leads ‘inside’.
The tall pine at the end – still notable
though it lost its lingam top for winter firewood –
begins the village: a couple of streets, a temple,
an open space with the pond and the peepul tree,
rows of brick houses, little businesses
proceeding under their doll’s-house-level beams;
rice being pounded, charcoal fires in pots,
rickshaws for people like me who don’t want them.
The children wave and call ‘Bye-bye! Paisa?’
holding out their perfect hands for my coins.
These houses may be eighteenth-century:
I covet their fretted lattice window-frames
and stare slightly too long into back rooms.
There are no screens at the carved windows, no filters
for the water they splash and drink at the common pump;
and no mosquitoes now, in the early spring.
But finally, stepping over the warm threshold
of the temple courtyard, I feel a tentative itch;
passing the scummy tank, a little sickness;
touching an infant’s head, a little pain.
Bodnath
I have made my pilgrimage a day early:
Ash Wednesday is tomorrow; this week is Losar.
Pacing clockwise around the chaitya
I twirl the prayerwheels, my foreign fingers
polishing their bronze by a fraction more.
The courtyard is crowded with Tibetans,
incredibly jewelled and furred and hatted –
colour-plates from the National Geographic.
The beggar-woman with her monstrous leg
and the snuffling children are genuine too.
I toss them paisa; then go to spend
thirty rupees on a turquoise-studded
silver spoon for the Watkins’ baby.
High on his whitewashed mound, Lord Buddha
overlooks the blossom of kite-tails
fluttering from his solid neck.
Om Mani Padme Hum.
His four painted square faces
turn twelve coloured eyes on the globe.
In the shrine below I see him again:
dim bronze, made of curves and surfaces,
shadowed, vulnerable, retiring.
Filmy scarves of white muslin
veil him; rice-grains lie at his feet;
in copper bowls arranged before him
smouldering incense crumbles to ash.
External Service
Already I know my way around the bazaar,
can use half a dozen words of basic Nepali,
and recognise several incarnations of Shiva.
If I stay here much longer I shall learn to identify
more trees besides those in our compound,
other birds than the rock-dove and the crow.
That plink-plink rhythm in the distance is a rice-mill.
The cannon is fired at noon, or to mark a death –
an echoing gesture. Now on the foreign news
I hear that the serious thunder-makers from Ireland
have crossed the channel. A pall of thick black smoke,
says the tidy English voice, hangs over London.
Here the sky is crystal. It is time to go.
Flying Back
They give us moistened BOAC towels
and I scrub my forehead. Red powder
for Holi: a trace of Delhi, an assault
met there in the wild streets this morning.
Without compunction I obliterate it –
India’s not my country, let it go.
But crumpling the vermilion-stained napkin
(I shan’t read it: some priest may do that)
I think of the stone foreheads in their hundreds:
Ganesh and Hanuman, who made me smile,
and Vishnu, and the four faces of Buddha,
reddened with genuine devotions;
and of the wooden cleft in a twisted tree
which I saw a beggar-woman sign scarlet
before she pressed her face down on to it;
and here’s Nepal again. Sacred places
don’t travel. The gods are stronger at home.
But if my tentative western brow may wear
this reluctant blush, these grains at the hair-roots,
I claim the right also to an image
as guardian; and choose winged Garuda.
His bland archaic countenance beams out
that serenity to which I journey.
Near Creeslough
I am in a foreign country.
There are heron and cormorant on the lake.
Young men in T-shirts against an Atlantic gale
are wheeling gravel, renewing the paths
in a stone shell chalked with their own
Similar Books
