the world pulse

Always Blissful Mother
by Kamlalakanta Chakrabarti

Mother, you’re always blissful.
You charmed destructive Shiva,
you dance in your own joy,
and clap your hands to keep time.
O Elemental, Eternal One!
Your form is empty space,
yet the moon adorns your brow.
Where did you get your garland of severed heads,
before the universe came into being?
You are the operator,
and we nothing but machines
that run by your rule.
We stay where you put us,
and say what you make us say.
Cursing you, O Destructive One,
restless Kamlalakanta says:
With the sword in your hand
you’ve slaughtered my faith
together with my disbelief.

The ground is damp with liquid marrow—
Skeletal ghouls with sunken eyes
jostle and elbow—
looking furtively around them
extinguishing the fires
with gleeful hearts
they eat half-burned corpses—
There, in that menacing forest
holding fire in his hand
dances our beautiful lord.

-Karaikkal Ammeiyar, a sixth century female poet-devotee of Lord Shiva, one of the 63 Nayanar Saints

(Vidya Dehejia, Antal and Her Path of Love: Poems of a Woman Saint from South India, 1990)

& i’ll sit where grey feathers gather
in the sunlight where dead leaves lie 
on the grass, living still
held in every stage, de-composing a lullaby
w/ sleepy-lidded twigs & elm branches
snapped by breezes gone for always

bark travels further than my dreams

brittle, holy

all things participate in the one reality

charred at the joint, struck by a fleeting flash
the whole garden hangs on the woodpecker’s last syllable
as a fly looming close to page descends on “if it is”
before buzzing away, its own perfect nature
gleaming, apparent

his nose to the ground, his paw upraised
in blessing
as the silver maple eases its reluctance, a leaf,
a leaf, a leaf let
f
r
e
e
toward the ground, soft as the silence
preceding sound…

i rise to walk with it

Sivoham, Sivoham.

-Nandikesha de Haan-Jungwirth, sitting in the grass near the garden out back in NE Minneapolis late October 2010.

Do you come from my heart,
sweeting penetrating drum?

Do you breathe upon reeds of the stars,
far reaching melody where Love
seeks ever still to arrive lingering
notes and rests you need?

No, Beloved Sleeper, the beat you hear
repeats in the awakening of all hearts
the seed of a fire in the heart of What Is.

What Is enters and seeks to arouse you
from sleep
to this dance day calls for
night works.

Yes, from your heart it is I
speaking, the Lord of the Stars.
My never-to-be-completed seeking
completion is the music
that reaches out to you so
stirring this reaching in you.

Now your body moves from the hub.
Your mind turns out
from the divine spring
in bridal clothes.

The reed and the head of a drum
/
call for this

immediate answering call
and recall
the bow upon its string sounds.

-first section of Robert Duncan’s “THE FIVE SONGS”, from Ground Work II: In The Dark

4

This foyer - this language - burns within language,
this light aflame in the light,
this darkening in the realms of the dark,
my breath in his breathing …

-excerpt from Robert Duncan’s “Structure of Rime” in Ground Work II: In The Dark

O small self, you are a sparkling fish
at play in the ocean of consciousness,
and your life is swiftly coming to its end.
Death will skim above you and throw its sharp net.
You will not be protected by your watery world,
for selfish actions have kept you in the shallows.

The fisherman’s fatal net will surround you suddenly,
Why do you remain so near the surface of relative existence
where Death is granted its fishing grounds?
Yet there is still time.
Leave the dangerous shoreline, mundane mind,
and plunge into the silent produndity,
the black waters of Mother Kali’s mystery.

-Ramprasad

Though my mind
wanders everywhere
I am not to blame.
Goddess Kali, You are the brilliant Magician,
and I am Your sleight of hand.
I dance as Mother dances through me.

Mysterious Kali, you manifest
as the virtuous practice of religion
and as wild, rebellious action.
This is your secret, your universal play.

You alone are fertile earth and flowing waters,
and you are the conscious energy behind the universe.
You are burning love experienced by lovers
and calm illumination in the hearts of sages.
This oneness is revealed by Shiva,
your intimate consort, O Wisdom Mother,
who is plunged into luminous rapture
by the touch of your dancing feet.   

Mother alone manifests light and darkness,
delight and despair,
as esoteric scriptures of the Goddess make clear.
Inebriated by Her mystery,
this poet lover weeps and sings:
“The thread of my life is spun
on the cosmic spinning wheel
of action and reaction.
Mad with the bliss of oneness,
Ma Kali and Her consort, Absolute Reality,
weave innumerable lives, magic threads on a single loom,
causing them to enact spontaneously
the wonderful dream-play of the universe.”

-Ramprasad

So I love what is “real”.         How awkwardly we name it:
the “actual”, the “real”, the “authentic” —What Is.

I have come to it as if I could have been “away”,
flooded thru by the sorrow of the unlived, the unanswerd,
tho I knew not and had not the courage of asking
       the question that calld for it,
the real I did see.               The real so toucht me

      I could not speak before it.

-the last section of ”In The South” from Ground Work II: In The Dark by Robert Duncan

today when i woke i
couldn’t recall the words you spoke
from the bed, wrapped in Light in the dark of my mother’s room
but on my knees, my body bowed forward
the longest hairs on my head could just begin to touch 
the soles of Your Lotus Feet
there, palms as prayers pressed together, i cried without tears
as Your song spilled through dream into the wake of earliest morning:

Jai Jai Ma, Jai Jai Ma, Jai Jai Maaa, Jai Jai Ma
Jai Jai Ma, Jai Jai Ma, Jai Jai Maaa, Jai Jai Ma
Jai Jai Ma, Jai Jai Ma, Jai Jai Maaa, Jai Jai Ma 

You are my Mother, You are my Guru, You are my All
Bestower of Bliss, live forever enthroned in the lotus of my heart
every moment may I remember You, that i may remember my very Self
Jai Ma, Jai Ma, Om Matri Gurave Namaha!

in Your Love,
Nandikesha