Mules
On the great
Tibetan
salt route they meet me again
old forsaken
friends…
On their
faces
fatigue of a drunken sleep
their lives worn out,
their legs
twisted, shaking
from carrying
illustrious flags of bleeding
ascents.
Age long bells
clinging
to them like festering wounds
bleating notes
of a
slavery modernism brings:
cartons of iceberg, Chinese tiles, tin cans,
carom boards
sacks of rice
and iodised salt from the plain of Nepal
Terai.
Butterflies of
the
terraced fields know their names
Singing brooks tempests
of their
breathless climbs.
Traffic-alert
And time-tested, they climb
carrying dreams of
peacock
pamphlets
of a secret religious war
filth
of an
ecologist's sterile semen
entire kitchen
for a cocktail party at the
base camp
defunct development
agenda of guilty donors
the West's
weird visions
lusting for an instant purge.
Stonesteps
of the
mountains embossed
on their drugged brains,
like lines of aborted
love
scratched
on historic rocks of waterspouts.
Starry skies
of the
dozing valley know
the ache
of their secret sweat.
Sunny days
along
the crystal rivers know
the taste
of their bleeding eyes.
Greatest fiction
of
the struggling lives lost,
like real mules
clattering their hooves
on the flagstones,
in circling
the cruel grandeur
of
bloodthirsty
mulepaths around the glacials of Annapurna.
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