WALLS OF SILENCE
Kamayani Bisht
Walls of silence
that build chapels in The Vatican
are made of stone;
cold stone
and wood that
waits to become fire.
They’re made of
the fumes of extinguished candles
that live inside
the habits of convents.
They’re made of
the grace of the Fathers and the Brothers
and also of the shame
of the Sisters
beyond the Sunday
mass
when little girls
and their little brothers entertain
the solemn saints
on the frescos
with their
colourful laughter for an hour or two.
Monday brings back
the nameless midwife
to deliver another
sin unto the tower of silence.
Walls have ears
but they’ve lost their hearing to
the din of high
decibel hymns
and the occasional
pangs of the guilty abyss.
Ah wonderful walls
***
QUEEN OF HILLS
No no no
I hate my town
being called queen
Queen of Hills
Not because I have
the poor man's angst
and anger for the
supercilious kings and their pristine queens--
but because my
queen really is nobody’s queen.
She is everybody’s
Madame--
infiltrated by
all...infringed by all
denuded, carved, spanked, tied, violated
in ways that give them pleasure...unique, collective,
holy, pervert.
And they insist,
she’s the queen-- benign to all who seek her,
available to all
who bring their flirting tools.
And cameras of
course!
She smiles
ruefully at the uncouth nightly visitors
who return her
favour with mouthfuls of unkind appreciation.
She mourns the
loss of her limbs
She counts the
hair she is losing to transmitted disease
She wails in
memory of her queenly past
And she waits for
the quiet winter
when she will
bandage her wounds in pristine white
to hide her
outraged modesty from her own children.
She wonders if her
suitors have heard of ‘consent’.
She wonders if she
needs to recall her voice
to erase the
paeans from all travelogues
with the one
primal cry that will
return her to her
throne.
She wonders when
it will be a good time
to start being
Queen again...queen of the hills.
***
FAITH
No it is not
difficult
to have faith in
tomorrow--
Not any more than
that queue of vermilion smeared heads
lined up at the
unfinished temple,
being built by the
small-town contractor.
The temple doesn’t
have a god yet;
he is under
construction in a roadside ghetto in another town,
but faith has
found its way up the prospect hill:
Faith, in the
brick walls that will house a piece of mortar,
Faith in the
incense that will build a bed of ash
for the god to
find its seat on.
The ants don’t
know which god will arrive
jiggling in the
sand lined trunk of the yellow truck
that ferries
workers to the construction site
on all other days.
But they know this
is where they can come and steal
Some prasadam today,
tomorrow and forever.
Of course,
tomorrow comes. It comes
when today
crumples off like a dry leaf from my bonsai peepal;
it comes when the
one waiting for its arrival
has passed into
yesterday.
And it announces
it its arrival
with the arrogance
of the cement god who was stuck in traffic
but should have
been waited for.
***
Kamayani Bisht teaches English at the Government College in Shimla, India. She has two collections of poetry to her credit; The Witch Must Die and Other Poems (2019) and Recipe for Ladyfinger Pickle (2022). Her poems have found place in several anthologies.
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