Respectful Silence

Music
http://www.authorsden.com/
adstorage/29292/
bjorn_lynne-no_survivors_.mid

Outside a tarp, you sit
rubbing your hair with
ghee. Fill a basin with
water and buttermilk.

I watch you take off
your blouse, pour the
mixture though your hair.

Squat over the basin to
wash beneath your skirt.
I'm told where to place
my fold-up cot, near the
women in purple turbans,
matching veils.

Unclothed now, except for
veil, you pull your cot
to mine, your scintillating
silver ornaments with flames.
Nakki clips the goats, winds
the hair into skeins.

Urgency in this tribe to watch,
you who they call Ratti Ben
(Sister of Blood). To see Ratti Ben
pleasure me, the female shepherds
pull out tiny glass vials of snuff to
'clean' their eyes. They rub it into
their eyes, causing them to water
copiously, the pain they go through
to watch two women.

The female shepherds on their knees
surrounding us, climbing each other
as it gets beyond risque against a black
backdrop of stars. The bonds between
the shepherds and Ratti Ben strengthened
like calcium laid down in a bone.

How comforting to pass through ritual
with the support of a group. The stars
swing past midnight.

"Take the goats and leave us."
Her passion for me fleeting, but
most tender of gestures, the same
lust across cultures. She left me
sore in the bones I didn't know I
had.

It is difficult affection which
separates us at the veil. It was
with a woman of India that I can
hear an echo from our common past.

She extracted something from me,
everything I had to leave. A moment
that touched the shadow of something
passionate, an articulate scream.
Gestural language is universal, so slowly,
we come ... We come to understand one
another.

Respectful silence.


Copyright 2006 Sage Sweetwater
http://www.authorsden.com/sagesweetwater
http://www.myspace.com/sagesweetwater