POETRY: I Bide My Time

Sunlight on Water, Photo Credit: Joy Stocke

i met a Valmiki

     in the street

         hardly a cloth

              on his bare body

    poorest among the poor

                            he worked at a roadside tire shop

but walked upright

      every cell of his body

remembered, he said

         each blow, and cut, and stripe

                       that every hand in history dealt him

each stroke he claimed

                  burned as a welt

                           in the raw hide

                                      of his threadbare soul

i am your chuhra

       he said to an interested customer

                  your forgotten bhel and sansi

    the bhat you chased away

                         three thousand years since

i am the tribes

            you thought you had destroyed

                                              forever

i bide my time

     with others of my kind

          with all of them

                 awaiting the moment

approaching nearer each day

when the wheel of history

           shall turn again

                  and redress

      our wrongs

we are your chuhras

     we bring our rude songs

          to your bungalows

  for a pittance

      out in your vast lawns

                     we present the ghost dance

                                           of our past

                     we who are the dispossessed

           bring you

                  the taste

              of possessing

 a forgotten culture

                     and you sit back

in your deep sofas

       and turn us out

  after all is done

              cracking up in laughter

at our helplessness

               but we go straight

                      to the mandir

                                      behind the blue-dome

                  you don’t even know it exists

           and we offer from the little we have

                   a small portion

                         to our patron saint

                              the poet Valmiki

                   younger far

          than the generations as we count them

                   than the ages in which we too flourished

                            but a poet still

                                   of the dispossessed     

     and we bide our time

               with farid and nanak

          with wandering kabir

and meera singing in the streets

    with lal ded who challenged

           the violence of ritual

seven hundred years since in Kashmir

        with habba sick with love

                   roving the valley

            princess

                  and poet of the poor  

              and the sage bhartrihari

             we bide our time

                         awaiting the moment

        approaching nearer

                          each day