India Your Blazing
India, your blazing
palette pulsates over bodies
of women in saris.
Cotton and silk
the color of passion
shock our sleeping
Western minds.
What is this fire
in your heart, India? This heat
of compost everywhere,
these burning bodies of the dead
filling the air
with ochre smoke,
this hunger smoldering
through generations.
Your black-haired children,
whose cries scorch the night
while we sweat in our beds,
crowd around us in the streets
by day, their hands
outstretched as if to say—
Baba, pull me from these flames.
It's enough to burn our own
pale complaints to ashes.
