Kali

Kali

Kali

A goddess chews on myth
As other women might on paan
Red juices stain her mouth.

Bored by her own powers
Immense and spectral, Kali broods
About Shiva, she is perverse.

She will not plead with him
Nor reveal Ganesha’s birth
She will not ask him home.

Shiva loves her, but absences
And apsaras are natural to him
No god is hampered by his sins.

Kali desires a mortal, whose day
Begins with her, ends at nightfall
In her arms, a man who will die

Without her, whose love is fallible
But secure, she wants to be held
Like a warm creature, not a fable.

Loneliness drives this goddess mad
She is vagrant, her limbs askew
She begs a mate, her hair unmade.

Fickle as Shiva, memory deserts her
Chandi or Durga or Parvati, which
Is she, which of her selves weeps here?

Even Ganesha, for whom she feels
Only tenderness, excludes her, even he
Seems impatient with her flaws.

Where should such a goddess turn?
Kali, mistress of the temporal worlds
Wants bliss defined in human terms.

Staid Ganesha knows this wildness
Must be curbed, Shiva, peripatetic
Agrees, and across the wilderness

Both gift Kali a companion eagle, hurt
By no arrow, fed on nothing, it returns
Each night to its eyrie in her heart.