Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 05:32:35 -0700 (PDT) From: Wolf Factory <wolf_factory-AT-yahoo.com> Subject: Re: ibm world?/Yasusada I searched the internet for the W.S. Merwin, "The Asians Dying," poem after reading the take on it posted here earlier. I found three of his poems in Atlantic Unbound but not the Asians dying. However I came across a (presumably) equally appalling poem by one Jane Kenyon, which displays the worst of western ignorance and inability to look beyond the façade of third world countries. Here we have a woman longing for her religion, Christianity, because she finds Hinduism alien. We are somehow supposed to forgive her absurd comparisons because she is losing faith all together. And yet she fails to appreciate, as many westerners do that Christianity has its origins in those 'deprived' parts of the world whose 'incivility' shocks her. Perhaps appreciate is not the right word, westerners sure enough know what part of the world their religion stems from but not what that implies. A poor goat herder living in the west banks probably has more in common with Christ than all the population of New England! So in essence the real Christ might be just as dispiriting to her as the man sleeping on the pavement in her poem. WOMAN, WHY ARE YOU WEEPING? by Jane Kenyon One morning after the Crucifixion, Mary Magdalene came to see the body of Christ. She found the stone rolled away from an empty tomb. Two figures dressed in white asked her, "Woman, why are you weeping?" "Because," she replied, "they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him." Returned from long travel, I sit in the familiar, sun-streaked pew, waiting for the bread and wine of holy Communion. The old comfort does not rise in me, only apathy and bafflement. India, with her ceaseless bells and fire, her crows calling stridently all night; India with her sandalwood smoke, and graceful gods, many-headed and many- armed, has taken away the one who blessed and kept me. The thing is done, as surely as if my luggage had been stolen from the train. Men and women with faces as calm as lakes at dusk have taken away my Lord, and I don't know where to find him. * What is Brahman? I don't know Brahman. I don't know saccidandana, the bliss of the absolute and unknowable. I only know that I have lost the Lord in whose image I was made. Whom shall I thank for this pear, sweet and white? Food is God, prasadam, God's mercy. But who is this God? The one who is not this, not that? The absurdity of all religious forms breaks over me, as the absurdity of language made me feel faint the day I heard friends giving commands to their neighbor's dog in Spanish.... At first I laughed, but then I became frightened. * They have taken away my Lord, a person whose life I held inside me. I saw him heal, and teach, and eat among sinners. I saw him break the sabbath to make a higher sabbath. I saw him lose his temper. I knew his anguish when he called, "I thirst!," and received vinegar to drink. The Bible does not say it, but I am sure he turned his head away. Not long after he cried, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?," I watched him reveal himself risen to Magdalene with a single word: "Mary!" It was my habit to speak to him. His goodness perfumed my life. I loved the Lord, he heard my cry, and he loved me as his own. * A man sleeps on the pavement, on a raffia mat -- the only thing that has not been stolen from him. This stranger who loves what cannot be understood has put out my light with his calm face. Shall the fire answer my fears and vapors? The fire cares nothing for my illness, nor does Brahma, the creator, nor Shiva who sees evil with his terrible third eye; Vishnu, the protector, does not protect me. I've brought home the smell of the streets in the folds of soft, bright cotton garments. When I iron them the steam brings back the complex odors that rise from the gutters, of tuberoses, urine, dust, joss, and death. * On a curb in Allahabad the family gathers under a dusty tree, a few quilts hung between light posts and a wattle fence for privacy. Eleven sit or lie around the fire while a woman of sixty stirs a huge pot. Rice cooks in a narrow-necked crock on the embers. A small dog, with patches of bald, red skin on his back, lies on the corner of the piece of canvas that serves as flooring. Looking at them I lose my place. I don't know why I was born, or why I live in a house in New England, or why I am a visitor with heavy luggage giving lectures for the State Department. Why am I not tap-tapping with my fingernail on the rolled-up window of a white government car, a baby in my arms, drugged to look feverish? * Rajiv did not weep. He did not cover his face with his hands when we rowed past the dead body of a newborn nudging the grassy banks at Benares -- close by a snake rearing up, and a cast-off garland of flowers. He explained. When a family are too poor to cremate their dead, they bring the body here, and slip it into the waters of the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers. Perhaps the child was dead at birth; perhaps it had the misfortune to be born a girl. The mother may have walked two days with her baby's body to this place where Gandhi's ashes once struck the waves with a sound like gravel being scuffed over the edge of a bridge. "What shall we do about this?" I asked my God, who even then was leaving me. The reply was scorching wind, lapping of water, pull of the black oarsmen on the oars.... =="All the wolves in the wolf factory paused at noon, for a moment of silence." ........from laughing Gravy by John Ashbery. --------------------------------------------------------- Looking for something good and original to read? Check out: http://www.mesopotamia.free-online.co.uk _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free -AT-yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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